Alastair Quotes

Across the land, the semaphore towers stood deathly still. ~ Alastair Reynolds

The pressures to get the story first, if wrong, are greater sometimes than the pressures to get the story right, if late. ~ Alastair Campbell

We should confine booing in sports arenas to sport. I love a good boo as much as the next football fan. ~ Alastair Campbell

Charles had climbed on a bench and was calling out that he had something to say, creating a racket that quickly got the attention of the room. Everyone looked immensely surprised, including Tessa and Will. Sona frowned, clearly thinking Charles was very rude. She didn't know the half of it, Cordelia thought darkly.
"Let me be the first to raise a glass to the happy couple!" said Charles, doing just that. "To James Herondale and Cordelia Carstairs. I wish to add personally that James, my brother's parabatai, has always been like a younger brother to me."
"A younger brother he accused of vandalizing greenhouses across our fair nation," muttered Will.
"As for Cordelia Carstairs - how to describe her?" Charles went on.
"Especially when one has not bothered to get to know her at all," murmured James.
"She is both beautiful and fair," said Charles, leaving Cordelia to wonder what the difference was, "as well as being brave. I am sure she will make James as happy as my lovely Grace makes me." He smiled at Grace, who stood quietly near him, her face a mask. "That's right. I am formally announcing my intention to wed Grace Blackthorn. You will all be invited, of course."
Cordelia glanced over at Alastair; he was expressionless, but his hands, jammed into his pockets, were fists. James had narrowed his eyes.
Charles went on merrily. "And lastly, my thanks go out to the folk of the Enclave, who supported my actions as acting Consul through our recent t ~ Cassandra Clare

Sooner or later everything boils down to trust. You just have to make that leap of faith. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Wes is Wes," Alastair said. "One in every family. I love him, but I think of him as a sarcastic pet. ~ John Scalzi

First rule of complex systems," I said. "You can't tell friends from enemies. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Then they'd be wrong. It's only our deeds that make us evil, Tanner; they're what define us, nothing else, not our intentions or feelings. But what are a few bad deeds compared to a life, especially the kinds of lives we can live now? ~ Alastair Reynolds

The bad news for journalists today is that the media, however seriously people who are in the public eye take it, is not taken as seriously as it once was - by the public. ~ Alastair Campbell

See the opportunities for adventures, not the constraints that get in the way. ~ Alastair Humphreys

The two men
Fray and Malkin
were standing near each other. They were not unarmed. They were quite seriously not unarmed. Both men were carrying
or at least aiming
what could only be categorised as small artillery pieces: two bulky gas-powered spinguns, so heavy that they had to be strapped to their bodies via thick leather girdles. Malkin was aiming at the angels, more or less. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Without risk in our lives, we're scarcely better than machines ourselves. ~ Alastair Reynolds

I've never had much interest in spinoffery - the idea of writing in someone else's universe generally leaves me cold - but 'Doctor Who' is different. I've grown up with it. It's been part of my life since I was tiny, watching Jon Pertwee on a grainy black and white television in Cornwall and being terrified out of my mind. ~ Alastair Reynolds

I've seen marvelous things, Sunday. I've looked back from the edge of the system and seen this planet, this Earth, reduced to a tiny dot of pale blue. I know what that feels like. To think that dot is where we came from, where we evolved out of the chaos and the dirt. And I know what it feels like to imagine going further. To hold that incredible, dangerous thought in my mind, if only for an instant. To think: what if I don't go home? What if I just keep traveling? Watching that pale-blue dot fall ever further away, until the darkness swallowed it and there was no turning back. Until Earth was just a blue memory. ~ Alastair Reynolds

I do think it's strange that I get associated with Iraq more than the people who were Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary. It's because of my closeness to Tony [Blair], which I don't regret at all. I think that was a privilege. ~ Alastair Campbell

To Sky, Clown had become something to be understood; something to be dissected and parameterised. Clown, he now recognised, was something like the bubble-drawing the dolphin had made in the water: a projection carved from light rather than sound. ~ Alastair Reynolds

You look older, son." "Yes, well, some of us have to get on with the business of being alive in the entropic universe. ~ Alastair Reynolds

And the knowledge that humanity was not alone in the universe would be as relevant to most as the knowledge that protons were built of quarks. ~ Alastair Reynolds

observing the way the rig needed only occasional human intervention to stay locked on the road. Doubtless it could have managed with none at all, were it not for local union laws. Very ~ Alastair Reynolds

I think the danger with using the term 'trilogy' is that it sets up particular expectations in the reader's mind. ~ Alastair Reynolds

I cannot bear to go back alone - to the world I have lived in with you. ~ Georgette Heyer

We've had science fiction novels where China is dominant; we've had novels where India is dominant, and I suppose it's all about getting away from that cliched old tired idea that the future belongs to the West. ~ Alastair Reynolds

I prioritise story over science, but not at the expense of being really stupid about it. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Having created these cognitively enhanced creatures, the safest option at the time appeared to be to launch them into interstellar space. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Birth and death frame a life, give it shape. Without that border it just becomes a kind of sprawling mess, a thing with no edge, no definition, no centre. ~ Alastair Reynolds

I thought my Beatles LPs sounded pretty good on a record player, but that was before I had heard a CD. ~ Alastair Wood

I want to write more books, see my first novel made into a film, fight more campaigns, work in more countries. I want to be able to recall experiences that have endured for their pleasure and range and intensity. ~ Alastair Campbell

But the trouble with simulations is that they put up with far too much shit. ~ Alastair Reynolds

How nice for you to be related to such an important sort of demon," said Alastair dryly.
"If it actually cared that James was related to an 'important' demon, it should have said something to me, too," said Lucie. "I am his sister. I do not appreciate being overlooked. ~ Cassandra Clare

The principal difference between childhood and the stages of life into which it invariably dissolves is that as children we occupy a limitless present. The past has scarcely room to exist, since, if it means anything at all, it means only the previous day. Similarly, the future is in abeyance; we are not meant to do anything at all until we reach a suitable size. Correspondingly, the present is enormous, mainly because it is all there is.... Walks are dizzying adventures; the days tingle with unknowns, waiting to be made into wonders. Living so utterly in the present, children have an infinite power to transform; they are able to make the world into anything they wish, and they do so, with alacrity. There are no preconceptions, which is why, when a child tells us he is Napoleon, we had better behave with the respect due to a small emperor. Later in life, the transformations are forbidden; they may prove dangerous. By then, we move into a context of expectations and precedents of past and future, and the present, whenever we manage to catch it and realize it, is a shifting, elusive question mark, not altogether comfortable, an oddness that the scheme of our lives does not allow us to indulge. Habit takes over, and days tend to slip into pigeonholes, accounted for because everything has happened before, because we know by then that life is long and has to be intelligently endured. ~ Alastair Reid

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

Wind snapped at me, warm and fragrant. The atmosphere was thick with pollen and micro-organisms, goading my body's ancient defences. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Khouri had never really given much thought to the slowness of light. There was nothing in the universe that moved faster ... but, as she now saw, it was glacial compared to the speed that would be needed to keep their love alive. ~ Alastair Reynolds

It's one thing to be given a big boxful of theory and quite another to make an engine out of it. ~ Alastair Reynolds

We've created an impression that life is risk-free, and it's not. ~ Alastair Wood

For all that the papers would say I was a liar, I took the words I was saying at briefings as seriously as Tony Blair took what he would say at the Despatch Box. I find it very difficult not to tell the truth. I felt I was accountable for what I said. ~ Alastair Campbell

I'll argue to the death against stupid legislation, but some rules exist for a reason. ~ Alastair Reynolds

It was a wartime story, goodies versus baddies, lots of explosions and shooting. The Germans always shouted 'Aiiieeee!' as they died. Atkins wondered what he would choose, confronted with similar circumstances. 'Aiiieeee!' seemed to him to lack the necessary gravitas and originality, as well as sounding a bit, well, German. But then who knew what might come to mind, in those final moments? ~ Alastair Reynolds

I saw immediately what they were: human technology that had become haunted, possessed by quick, gleaming cleverness. I had seen smart machines before then, but nothing with the agility and cunning of true intelligence. I knew instantly that these were a different order of machine. Some alchemy of chaos and complexity had given their minds powers of consciousness and free will. ~ Alastair Reynolds

My aunty says I'm the double of my father. He was a workaholic, which I've definitely inherited. And like me, he could be the life and soul of the party, but also quite withdrawn. ~ Alastair Campbell

We're all Poseidon's children, Geoffrey: whether we like it or not."

"Poseidon's children," he repeated. "Is that supposed to mean something?"

"We came through. That's all. We weathered the absolute worst that history could throw at us, and we thrived. Now it's time to start doing something useful with our lives. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Weyl curvature tensor ... but consciousness was no ~ Alastair Reynolds

I live each day as it comes." "It's the only way. Pedro ~ Alastair Reynolds

She loved sarcasm, especially from engineers. ~ Alastair Reynolds

You look ill," Matthew observed. "Is it my dancing? Is it me personally?"
"Perhaps I'm nervous," she said. "Lucie did say you didn't like many people."
Matthew gave a sharp, startled laugh, before schooling his face back into a look of lazy amusement. "Did she? Lucie's a chatterbox."
"But not a liar," she said.
"Well, fear not. I do not dislike you. I hardly know you," said Matthew. "I do know your brother. He made my life miserable at school, and Christopher's, and James's."
"Alastair and I are very different," Cordelia said. She didn't want to say more than that. It felt disloyal to Alastair. "I like Oscar Wilde, for instance, and he does not."
The corner of Matthew's mouth curled up. "I see you go directly for the soft underbelly, Cordelia Carstairs. Have you really read Oscar's work?"
"Just Dorian Gray," Cordelia confessed. "It gave me nightmares."
"I should like to have a portrait in the attic," Matthew mused, "that would show all my sins, while I stayed young and beautiful. And not only for sinning purposes - imagine being able to try out new fashions on it. I could paint the portrait's hair blue and see how it looks."
"You don't need a portrait. You are young and beautiful," Cordelia pointed out.
"Men are not beautiful. Men are handsome," objected Matthew.
"Thomas is handsome. You are beautiful," said Cordelia, feeling the imp of the perverse stealing over her. Matthew was looking stubborn. "James is beautiful too, ~ Cassandra Clare

Everything came and went, everything was new and bright with promise once and old and worn out later, and everything left a small, diminishing stain on eternity, a mark that time would eventually erase. ~ Alastair Reynolds

May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother, about the Queen - classic Freudian stuff, shrinks would say. I was eight, and refusing to watch the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast. ~ Alastair Campbell

Later that week, I was bicycling down a pavement in the City of London when I passed a company called DLE, which stands for Davis Langdon & Everest.
Hmm, I thought, as I skidded to a halt.
I took a deep breath and then confidently walked into their ultraclean, ultrasmart reception, and asked to be put through to the CEO's office, saying it was both urgent and confidential.
Once I had the CEO's secretary on the line, I pleaded with her to help me get just two minutes of her boss's time.
Eventually after three attempts, due to a combination of pity and intrigue, she agreed to ask the CEO to see me for "literally two minutes."
Bingo.
I was escorted into a lift and then ushered into the calm of the CEO's top-floor office. I was very nervous.
The two head guys, Paul Morrell and Alastair Collins, came in, looking suspiciously at this scruffy youngster holding a pamphlet. (They later described it as one of the worst-laid-out proposals they had ever seen.)
But they both had the grace to listen.
By some miracle, they caught the dream and my enthusiasm, and for the sake of £10,000 (which to me was the world, but to them was a marketing punt), they agreed to back my attempt to put the DLE flag on top of the world.
I promised an awesome photograph for their boardroom.
We stood up, shook hands, and we have remained great friends ever since.
I love deals like that. ~ Bear Grylls

I remember talking to Alex Ferguson about Tony [Blair] and Gordon [Brown], and he said: "Why doesn't Tony just get rid of him?" But if you sack someone in football, they can't turn up to training the next day. In politics they're still on the pitch. Gordon would still have been a big player. ~ Alastair Campbell

One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Banking and Prosperity in the Thirteenth Occupation or even A Child's Treasury of Economics or The Young Person's Illustrated Omnibus of Fiscal Prudence. ~ Alastair Reynolds

That's what love is – sacrifice. Sacrificing everything ... ~ Alastair Reynolds

Everyone has their fulcrum, Chiku. You can bend anyone to any cause with the right timing. ~ Alastair Reynolds

As her psychosis took hold she moved deeper and deeper into the house, putting as much distance as possible between herself and the outside world. This became her world. To begin with it was just a few rooms. Then it contracted down to just this one, and then to just this tank. Even that wasn't enough. She constructed barriers to fool and delay the ghosts. Corridors that don't lead anywhere, or which spiral back on themselves. Hidden stairways that they won't see. Mirrors everywhere, to baffle and confuse her tormentors. Doors that open onto walls. Of course, even that isn't sufficient by itself. The ghosts are clever and resourceful, and they'll keep trying to find a way in. That's why the house has to keep changing, so that they never get used to one particular configuration. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Cyphel 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 Campion'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

But a constant, low-level background of crime may help a society become more robust, more resilient. ~ Alastair Reynolds

The media are obsessed with spin doctors and with portraying them as a bad thing, yet seem addicted to our medicine. ~ Alastair Campbell

We don't own them, and we don't have any claims on moral superiority. But after all we've done to them in the past we do have an obligation to shepherd them through to better times.' He ~ Alastair Reynolds

I am not cruel," he said. "Not in the sense you mean. But cruelty is a useful tool if one can only recognise the precise moment when it must be used. ~ Alastair Reynolds

So she talked, and Noah, to his credit, did not quibble. He interrupted once or twice, but only for the sake of amplification or clarification, never because he doubted the essential veracity of her story. She told him all of it, from the pod, to the aircraft, to Eunice and the Tantors. She told him what she had learned of Eunice's nature, and why she had no reason to doubt that she had been talking to a machine. She told him of Eunice's amnesia, and the thing called Arachne. ~ Alastair Reynolds

This may sound arrogant, but I believe that if we'd done teamship better, we'd still be there. Where we fell down was the inability to hold together. We should have learnt from the great football teams. The players may not like each other. They have egos, they have their own ambitions, they have different personalities, but they are still bloody good teams. ~ Alastair Campbell

You do not need to fly to the other side of the planet to find wilderness and beauty. ~ Alastair Humphreys

The flare-watch in East Nekhebet had picked up an energy pulse, much brighter than anything seen previously. Briefly, there was the worrying possibility that Delta Pavonis was about to repeat the flare which had wiped out the Amarantin: the vast coronal mass ejection known as the Event. But closer examination revealed that the flare did not originate from the star, but rather from something several light-hours beyond it, on the edge of the system. ~ Alastair Reynolds

I used to be very routine-based and the new thing in my life is not having a clear, full-time existence. ~ Alastair Campbell

We have made some collective mistakes as a species, it's true – invested too much power in things we can't see, let alone control. But look at the world we have, Chiku. For all its failings, things could be a great deal worse. No one's died in any wars lately, or been murdered, or left to rot in a prison, or been denied the basic allocation of fresh food and drinking water. No one's been tortured for their beliefs or made to feel like a pariah because of their sexual preferences. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Surely you can hear him now? ~ Alastair Reynolds

Like most meaningful activities, campaigns are team games. ~ Alastair Campbell

But beyond a certain scale vast was simply vast. ~ Alastair Reynolds

We have worlds to save, Doctor Aziba."
"That sounds ... compelling," the physician allowed. ~ Alastair Reynolds

A pro is someone who can do great work when he doesn't feel like it. ~ Alastair Cook

Truly, it was beautiful to watch. Cruel, too - I admitted that. But what was beauty without a little cruelty at its heart? ~ Alastair Reynolds

Then centrifugal gravity took over, and with something close to majesty the skeletal spacecraft descended out of the repair bay as smoothly and elegantly as a falling chandelier. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Friends have suggested that I am the least qualified person to talk about happiness, because I am often down, and sometimes profoundly depressed. But I think that's where my qualification comes from. Because to know happiness, it helps to know unhappiness. ~ Alastair Campbell

Nightside, cities glistened in chains, and a spray of tinkertoy habitats girdled the planet. Gossamer starbridges reached from the equator towards orbit. ~ Alastair Reynolds

They would continue to live in New Tiamaat, orbiting Crucible. ~ Alastair Reynolds

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

War was about yawning chasms of inactivity, punctuated by brief, screaming interludes of action. And in those brief, screaming interludes, events happened both quickly and with dreamlike slowness, every instant burned into memory. ~ Alastair Reynolds

The trouble with the dead, Triumvir Ilia Volyova thought, was that they had no real idea when to shut up. ~ Alastair Reynolds

I always say that keeping abreast of science should never be seen as a chore. It should be something you do naturally. I don't sit there reading 'New Scientist,' putting post-it notes next to ideas. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Greg Dyke is on record as saying that once the BBC was attacked, it was their job to defend themselves. But that is not their job. ~ Alastair Campbell

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

I never met David Kelly, but I knew from what he told other people that this was not his view. The BBC were saying that Tony Blair was making up lies so that he could send young men and women to war, maybe to die. I think that if the BBC had done their jobs professionally, they'd have realised that you couldn't justify what they said. And nothing has emerged since to justify that report. ~ Alastair Campbell

One in four of us will have a mental illness at some point. That is a lot of people. ~ Alastair Campbell

He watched Carl pouring coffee into a huge mug bearing a photo of a cute corgi, below which was the word Alastair. ~ K.C. Wells

Of course. Life would be tough for a repo man in the starship business. * * * The ~ Alastair Mayer

I think we need to think beyond the issue of absolute risk. ~ Alastair Wood

Paul Keating told us before we were elected that you can do deals with [Rupert] Murdoch without saying you were doing a deal. Did we do that kind of thing? Maybe. But from around about the turn of the century, I felt strongly that we had to do something about media ownership and self-regulation. Tony [Blair] disagreed. ~ Alastair Campbell

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

Adapt and survive. Make do and mend. These were good mottos for a time traveller. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Nothing endures, except nothing itself. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Quantum reality is a nest of snakes, Clavain, and we are already poking it with a very sharp stick. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Humanity is an assemblage of information-processing entities, and in that regard you have potential. ~ Alastair Reynolds

In less than twelve hours, Purslane's ship would be travelling so close to the speed of light that the fastest ship ever built would still need a hundred thousand years to catch up with her. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Matter is lazy. It resists change. It wants to keep on doing whatever it's doing, whether that's sitting still or moving. We call that laziness inertia, but that doesn't mean we understand it. For a thousand years we've labelled it, quantified it, caged it in equations, but we've still only scratched the surface of what it really is. ~ Alastair Reynolds

To me, marriage is partly a religious thing and I'm not religious. ~ Alastair Campbell

Cowards were exactly the kind of people you wanted around nuclear technology. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Clavain looked around the room, taking in the gruesome menagerie of wraithlike seniors, wizened elders and obscene glass-bottled end-state Conjoiners. They were all hanging on his answer, even the visible brains seeming to hesitate in their wheezing pulsations. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Some promises are best broken. Trust me on this: I'm a politician. ~ Alastair Reynolds

The place is of no concern to them. They've left it to fester. An informational dead zone. The abstraction doesn't penetrate here, by design. The dome rebuffs it. The family craved their privacy, their insularity. My alert was a simple radio frequency trigger, with just enough power to reach beyond the estate. A risk even in that, but one worth taking."
"You keep saying them," Dreyfus said.
"For a reason," Stasov answered. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Adventure is just about doing something you've never done - doing it with enthusiasm and curiosity: doing something difficult with passion. ~ Alastair Humphreys