Nothing had ever existed between us except the possibility of something, and now even that was over.

— Alastair Reynolds

Still, it was vision, or at least vision’s idiot cousin.

— Alastair Reynolds

That she had loved Sylvester because he was such a self-important bastard and made something noble of being a self-important bastard, did it with such utter aplomb that it became a kind of virtue, like the wearing of sackcloth

— Alastair Reynolds

The human capacity for grief. It just isn't capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn't just level off—it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feel a damn about these people.

— Alastair Reynolds

There's such a thing as free will, Tanner. You didn't have to go along with me, unless you want to admit your brain is ruled by your dick. And I didn't get the impression you regretted any of that.

— Alastair Reynolds

There was something heartbreaking beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space.

— Alastair Reynolds

To see something marvelous with your own eyes - that’s wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you’ll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an incomplete half of it, and that it won’t ever really exist as a whole until you’re together, talking or thinking about that moment ... that’s worth more than one plus one. It’s worth four, or eight, or some number so large we can’t even imagine it.

— Alastair Reynolds

Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you've vanquished.

— Alastair Reynolds

We all have it in us to be something other than what we are, I thought, but we don't often get a glimpse of what we could have been

— Alastair Reynolds

Without risk in our lives, we’re scarcely better than machines ourselves.

— Alastair Reynolds