Into Everywhere Quotes

“Where are we going?” Tony said.
“Somewhere wonderful,” Unlikely Worlds said.”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere

“Abulanam’s Pride emerged into a sky dominated by the heaven tree of a stellar nursery. Billowing thunderheads and swirling currents of sooty dust, silicate grains and gas aglow with the radiation of hot bright stars embedded in them. Ragged pillars, shaped by light and stellar winds, clawing across a dozen light years, spalling offshoots tipped with the blowsy haloes of stars birthing in collapsing knots of protostellar material. A vast, violent engine of creation.”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere

“Even the straightest path has two directions.”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere

“There are many stories,” Unlikely Worlds said, “but most follow similar patterns.”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere

“The tug of the lodestar slowly grew stronger until, with an abrupt quantum jump, it was a physical force prying at her mind. She felt everything else fall away, felt the same out-of-body swoon she’d experienced on First Foot when she’d stared too long at the star at the edge of the Badlands. Felt as if she was expanding beyond her body the room the ship into everywhere …”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere

“The things you people can do now!” Unlikely Worlds said. “The stories you make!”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere

“How to tell a story? First find a point of view.”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere

“Pyotr said that all children were God’s children, even those whose minds had been overwritten by alien memes.
“What about the Jackaroo and the !Cha?” Tony said.
“Those also.”
“And the Elder Cultures?”
“Of course. The universe and everything in it is Her Kingdom.”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere

“Keeping the human race in check must require a lot of multitasking.”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere

“That’s where we are,” he said. “One star amongst four hundred billion.”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere

“There were hundreds of worlds like it, most of them littered with the usual Elder Culture ruins, the usual secrets waiting to be unlocked. This one had been colonised by an atechnic cult sixty years ago. Maybe they were living the life of pastoral utopianism they’d planned; maybe they had descended into savagery and were roasting and eating prisoners of war captured in tribal wars fought with stone-tipped spears. No one knew nor cared.”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere

“Sometimes you hit the jackpot and sometimes the jackpot hits you, I guess.”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere

“They celebrated in a bar, and after half a dozen cocktails came to the mutual decision that it would be a blast to get married. So Lisa bought a couple of rings in a pawnshop and they did the deed in the hotel chapel, reading their vows in Klingon off an iPhone in front of a guy in golden robes and Spock ears.”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere

“They were sitting outside the big Starbucks that anchored the western end of Pioneer Square. Lisa was drinking iced tea sweetened with half a dozen packets of sugar, Bria a flat white, Pete sprawled under the table with a dish of water. All around, people sat at café tables in the late afternoon sunlight, perched on broad steps that dropped to the well where a gout of water pulsed and plashed. Smart little yellow trams ran along one side of the square, which was bordered by office buildings and the plate-glass windows of high-end shops. A sliver of Earth jammed into this alien world, where a dozen or more Elder Cultures had lived and died out or ascended to some unfathomable stage of consciousness, leaving behind ruins and artefacts, scraps of technology, algorithms and eidolons. A perfectly ordinary scene…”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere

“A lesson to people who think that, just because they’re a little smarter and luckier than ordinary people, they can do as they please.’ Lisa”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere