How did you. . . Pass the time?’ Sunday asked. ‘You couldn’t just chin gout of it, could you?’‘We had a different form of changing,’ Eunice said. ‘An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it “reading”.

— Alastair Reynolds

I don't know." That was typical Safari; like all the genuinely clever people Sylvester had met he knew better than to feign understanding where none existed.

— Alastair Reynolds

I'm not a morning person: I can't function until I've had a coffee - or several.

— Alastair Reynolds

It is always better to try and fail than not to try.

— Alastair Reynolds

It's called optimism — but I’m losing the hang of it fast.

— Alastair Reynolds

It’s not how far you’ve come that matters. It’s where you’ve come from.

— Alastair Reynolds

Luka shook her head. "We're talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It's like their only reason for existing was so they could die.

— Alastair Reynolds

Making love was a game of echoes. We had shared memories so many times that when I made love to her, I knew exactly how it felt to be Pursuant. I could taste and feel her other lovers, and she could taste and feel mine, each experience reaching away like a reflection in a hall of mirrors, diminishing into a kind of carnal background radiation, a sea of sensuous experience. I had been a girl once, then a thousand men and women and all their lovers. The stasis field locked on. The Synchro mesh took hold. I hurtled into my own future, while my ship ate space and time.- "House of Suns" by Alastair Reynolds

— Alastair Reynolds

Mathematics is a terrible calling. It’s as merciless as gravity. It swallows the soul. There’s a point near a black hole called the last stable orbit. Once you drop below that radius, no force in the universe can stop you falling all the way in. That’s what happened to your mother – she swam too close to theory, fell below the last stable orbit.

— Alastair Reynolds

No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.

— Alastair Reynolds