Iain M. Banks

Quotes

• “As a matter of fact I did flirt with Socialism, in my youth.""That when you were in university, was it?"He smiled. "Yes....”
• “[I]t was really only in the generation or two before hers that the idea had started to traverse the spectrum of likeliho...”
• “I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing ...”
• “There is something about the very idea of a city which is central to the understanding of a planet like Earth, and parti...”
• “She'd asked him what it was like to be in there, doing nothing but then being woken up to speak to somebody you couldn't...”
• “By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future rema...”
• “An intelligence completely dissociated from the physical, or at least an impression of it, was a strange, curiously limi...”
• “Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed," he said. "And I think they know in their hearts that other pe...”
• “It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could...”
• “It seemed perverse to some, but for all their apparent militarism the Gzilt had remained peaceful over many millenia; it...”
• “A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long a...”
• “Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilian...”
• “The game’s the thing. That’s the conventional wisdom, isn’t it? The fun is what matters, not the victory. To glory in th...”
• “[I]t would be a niceness that was enforced leniently, patiently and gracefully, with the sort of unflappable self-certai...”
• “That’s what we’ve lost, you know. What you’ve lost; all of you. A sense of wonder and awe and . . . sin. These people kn...”
• “What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis o...”
• “This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game. The man is a game-player called “Gurg...”
• “A new collection of matter and information to present to the universe and to which it in turn will be presented; differe...”
• “Darkness came like a black flag waved over the canyon, drawing back the grayness from the shores of the city, then pushi...”
• “I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real t...”
• “The Culture gives us so much, but in fact it’s only taking things away from us, lobotimizings everybody in it, taking aw...”
• “I love writing and can't imagine not being able to do it. I want an easy life and if it had been difficult doing it I wo...”
• “[M]y determined and strenuous endeavours to take in absolutely nothing of what I had regarded as entirely the most irrel...”
• “Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying all this wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and de...”
• “It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.She laughed. 'Really?'The machine shrugged and let go of her...”
• “You been mud wrestling..?' 'Only with my conscience.' 'Really? Who won?' 'Well, it was one of those rare occasions when ...”
• “The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea re...”
• “One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a ph...”
• “They speak very well of you".- "They speak very well of everybody."- "That so bad?"- "Yes. It means you can´t trust them...”
• “Patience can be a means of letting matters mature to a proper state for action, not just a way of letting time slip away...”
• “We are a race prone to monsters, she thought, and when we produce one we worship it.”
• “the ignobility of thought and action that desperation born of indigence produces.”
• “[T]here can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered.”
• “All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself.”
• “One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve.”
• “By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.”