Elysium Fire Quotes

“That's what happens when you've had great success in life—when you've achieved the one goal you always desired. You lose a sense of purpose. Your smallest anxieties fester and magnify. Your fears turn inward, and attach themselves to irrational concerns.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Elysium Fire

“The stability of the Glitter Band depends on social cohesion, Mister Garlin. We don’t have standing armies, we don’t have a citizen militia. Even the local constabularies constitute a vanishingly small proportion of our population. But this system only functions in the absence of malicious fear-mongering. I have no time for those who disseminate lies and half-truths for their own ends.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Elysium Fire

“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, Elysium Fire

“What’s the point in longevity if every day is a grey duplicate of the one before?”
― Alastair Reynolds, Elysium Fire

“Her situational training emphasised immediate practicalities: what it took to remain alive for the next minute, and the minute after that, rather than concerning herself with ten minutes or an hour from now. It was hard-won pragmatism, distilled from hundreds of real-world scenarios faced by earlier generations of prefects. The lesson was that it worked—most of the time.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Elysium Fire

“Perhaps there was some loop or circuit missing from the brains of people like Garlin, some absent process that prevented them from seeing themselves from outside their own skin, in all their ludicrousness. But to a degree, Sparver reflected, it must also be absent from those they swept up into their movements.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Elysium Fire