House of Suns Quotes

“To see something marvellous 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, House of Suns

“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, House of Suns

“The first six million years had been all fun and games.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

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

“Nothing had ever existed between us except the possibility of something, and now even that was over.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“All data is stale. The photons reaching your eyes are stale. They tell you that you are looking at something real, but you have no information that the objects before you still exist. They may have vanished into oblivion the instant those photons took wing.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“But beyond a certain scale vast was simply vast.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“Why do today what you can still do in a quarter of a million years?”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“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, House of Suns

“All I can say for certain is that, beneath the scrambled chaos of my memories, I feel a driving imperative, a sense of some vital task that I must complete, and which has not yet reached cessation. But I could be completely mistaken. Perhaps I was simply a tourist, ambling his way from sight to sight with no greater goal than to accumulate memories and experience - much like yourselves, in fact.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“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 Purslane. 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 Synchromesh took hold. I hurtled into my own future, while my ship ate space and time.

- "House of Suns" by Alastair Reynolds”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“Wind snapped at me, warm and fragrant. The atmosphere was thick with pollen and micro-organisms, goading my body’s ancient defences.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“I pushed my hand into the open slot of the maker and closed my fingers around the sculpted handle of the energy-pistol. The newly minted weapon had the peculiar heft of something crammed with intricate machinery at abnormal densities.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“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, House of Suns

“The game’s rules were Byzantine, and we had to work them out through trial and error. One rule, which had only gradually become apparent, was that one could only move into another character’s head if the move did not involve too big a jump in social status. A peasant could not swap into the head of a king, even if the king knelt down to kiss the peasant. But the peasant could get there by jumping into the head of a blacksmith, and then an armourer, and then an officer in the king’s guard, and so on - working their way up by discrete steps. Sometimes it would not be possible to change character between one session and the next, but that was all part of the game’s richly involving texture. It was difficult and slow, but because at each step one had access to the memories and personality of the inhabited character, it was seldom boring.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“We’re both here, two faces behind one mask. I’m sorry if I confuse you, but to me it’s perfectly natural to switch from one strand of my existence to the other. I am two rivers that have merged into one being, at the confluence.” Hesperus slowed his pacing. “More than five million years ago, long after the Golden Hour but long before I came to Neume, thinking machines found me. I was a novelty to them—huge and slow and wondrous. They were equally novel to me. 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 creatures were a different order of machine. Some alchemy of chaos and complexity had given their minds powers of consciousness and free will.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“It’s a trick. You’re agents of House Cantarini.” Sparver”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“The rim transit moved quickly, its motion counteracting the centrifugal gravity of the slow-turning wheel. Thalia sat next to Sparver, brooding.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“weighed down with the melancholic sense of being an unwilling curator in some dusty, little-visited museum of her own existence?”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“We accumulated experience for the sake of it, stretched our lives out across millions of years, but even when things were going well ... there was a neurotic anxiety at the back of all our minds, a shrill voice instructing us to see everything, to look round every corner, to leave no stone unturned. We were like children who had to try every sweet in the shop, even if it made us sick. We knew there was more of the galaxy than we could ever encompass by ourselves, but the voice did not allow us to take that as license to give up. All it said was try harder.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“Never put off until the next million years what you can do during this million.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“Everything’s connected,” I answered. “That doesn’t mean everyone’s working towards the same goal.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“This is how attrition happens, I thought to myself. You take one chance too many, imagining that all the previous instances of good fortune have somehow immunised you against hazard, when in fact you have simply been extraordinarily fortunate until now.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“What could be better than being a shatterling? Only one thing, I thought to myself. Being a wicked shatterling. Being a devil instead of an angel. Having all that power, all that wisdom, but being able to do anything with it. Being able to destroy as well as create.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“we have to keep him in a state of enlightened deception.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“Involvement doesn’t necessarily mean willing involvement”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“... shown beneath the map of the galaxy - was an outrageous confection of a planet: a striped marshmallow giant with a necklace of sugary rings, combed and braided by the resonant forces of a dozen glazed and candied moons.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“I’ve only been on this planet for ten minutes,’ I said. ‘Already I feel like I’ve overstayed my welcome.’ Purslane looked at me with icy forbearance. ‘Work really hard, and maybe next time you can get it down to five.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

“We’re still fumbling in the dark, trying to find out how to live on a galactic scale.”
― Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns