Paul McAuley Quotes

“The past doesn't change, does it?"
"It's still there, same as it ever was. But we see it differently as we get older.”

— Paul McAuley

“One thing that's certain about the future: it will have more history than the present.”

— Paul McAuley

But you need to cultivate patience, youngling. And you need to listen to my words of wisdom, because as far as you are concerned, I am Obi-Wan fucking Kenobi. Okay?

— Paul McAuley

“When people go looking for something, they often find something else.”

— Paul McAuley

“This is an age of superstition and wishful thinking. The sky is full of evening's empires, and every one of them is founded on sand.”

— Paul McAuley

“What is the mass of a feeling? What is its wavelength, its position on the electromagnetic spectrum?”

— Paul McAuley

“The multiverse, she said, was like an old library whose shelves were packed with books arranged by a cataloguing system that ranked them according to similarity, each book containing within its covers a story that varied only slightly from the stories of its immediate neighbours, but by increasing degrees from those of increasingly distant books.”

— Paul McAuley

“We live in an age that cannibalises its past because it has lost faith in its future.”

— Paul McAuley

“Pareidolia. They heard whispering voices in the radio pulses of Jupiter or Saturn.”

— Paul McAuley

To escape the deepening grip of multinational corporations and the Coca-colonisation of the weird. Out here, you could still have your mind eaten by an alien phantom, stumble upon a lost city, or discover a fraying thread of some kind of weird quantumised metamaterial that could kick-start a new industrial revolution and make you a billionaire. Out here were places not yet mapped. Old dreams and deep mysteries. A world wild and strange and still mostly unknown.

— Paul McAuley

“Listen: I'm not going to tell you what to do. We cannot make decisions for you. We came to help, but we do not want to interfere. We gave you a gift, yours to do with as you will. But you've heard all that before. We're happy to talk. To answer questions about why we don't stop war and suffering, cure cancer, end poverty, point the way to heaven or point out that there is no heaven. Ask us anything. We don't mind. We try our best to be candid, but there is an inevitable degree of mutual incomprehension. Because your qualia aren't our qualia. Because we're running models of who you think you are and what you think you know, but they're just models. Because the map isn't the territory. Because we aren't gods. We aren't even close. You know? At best, we're pipers at the gates of dawn. Who have come to this little blue planet to help.”

— Paul McAuley

“Your so-called "self" is a composite superimposed on the activity of many competing subpersonalities or agents. What you perceive as your consciousness is a string of temporary heroes rising above those they have defeated. And so you seek out heroes in the common story of your race.”

— Paul McAuley

“Absolute scientific truth was like the speed of light, a value which could be approached but never reached.”

— Paul McAuley

One day something will come through that will amaze us all.

— Paul McAuley

“Ugly Chicken says she's nice,' the little girl said. Freddie”

— Paul McAuley

A poster by the door to the locker room showed a Jackaroo avatar dressed as Uncle Sam, pointing a white-gloved finger under the caption I Want You for Anal Probing.

— Paul McAuley

“I fear that there will be no neat ending to this, in the manner of the old Greek plays. Where the Gods descend, and all is explained, and tidied away.”

— Paul McAuley