A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.

— Alastair Reynolds

At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred around until it reduced the problematic brain tissue to non-functioning porridge.

— Alastair Reynolds

But you will come to regret this, Abigail. This won’t be like one of the memories that fritters away into nothing when you come out of that game. This will leave a stain. You’ll carry for it forever, when you could have had a few more years of blissful innocence. Are you sure, now?

— Alastair Reynolds

Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and icefalls and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and super clusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic super void. In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to BE a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the *whole damned universe*!

— Alastair Reynolds

Cypher knew exactly how he felt about her as well — it was there in her expression whenever they spoke that beguiling combination of amusement and haughtiness that she carried off so well. It was a look that expressed disdain at Champion’s guarded advances but also a kind of measured probationary respect as well. It was a look that said You dare to think that I will find you as interesting as you obviously find me Well perhaps in that very act of daring you become interesting to me if only fleetingly.

— Alastair Reynolds

Dimly--at first wary that it was merely a dislodged fragment of the dream--she remembered Resurged. And then, slowly, events returned, not as a tidal wave, or even as landslide, but as a slow, squelching slippage: a disembowelment of the past.

— Alastair Reynolds

Enjoy it, kid. Enjoy feeling that you can make a difference.' Floyd flashed him a smile. 'It won't last forever.

— Alastair Reynolds

For a moment I think we were turned into information, and that in that instant we were linked to every other piece of information ever known; every thought ever thought, or at least ever captured by the light.

— Alastair Reynolds

Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognized during the lifetimes of its creators.

— Alastair Reynolds

History is what we write, not what we remember. Why should we tarnish the memory of our planet by enshrining our less than noble deeds?

— Alastair Reynolds