Simon

“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, Blue Remembered Earth

“Could kindness – by only ever taking little steps – twist itself into the worst kind of cruelty?”
― Alastair Reynolds, Revenger

“No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“Perhaps the greatest contradiction in our lives, the hardest to handle, is the knowledge 'There was a time when I was not alive, and there will come a time when I am not alive.' On one level, when you 'step out of yourself' and see yourself as 'just another human being', it makes complete sense. But on another level, perhaps a deeper level, personal nonexistence makes no sense at all. All that we know is embedded inside our minds, and for all that to be absent from the universe is not comprehensible. This is a basic undeniable problem of life...”
― Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid