Iain Banks quotes - page 4

Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it. (Iain Banks)
Some of us prefer history to legends, lady,” DeWar said heavily, "and sometimes everybody can be wrong. View quote
Iain Banks
You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you're doing. View quote
Iain Banks
We created something a little closer to perfection than ourselves; maybe that's the only way to progress. Let them try to do the same. I doubt they can, so they will always be less as well as more than us. It's all just a sum, a whispered piece of figuring lost in the empty blizzards of white noise howling through the universe, a brief oasis in an infinite desert, a freak bit of working out in which we have transcended ourselves, and they are only the remainder. View quote
Iain Banks
All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules. View quote
Iain Banks
Even the pain of what had felt on occasion like an irretrievably broken heart had consistently proved less lasting than she'd initially imagined and expected; the revelation that a boy's taste was so grotesquely deficient he could prefer somebody else to her always reduced both the intensity and the duration of the anguish her heart demanded be endured to mark such a loss of regard. View quote
Iain Banks
In all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots. View quote
Iain Banks
Of course, she does seem to be a rather good doctor. At the very least she has done the King no obvious harm, and that in my experience is far more than one might reasonably expect from a court physician. View quote
Iain Banks
He suspected the troops felt closer to somebody who spoke a different language but asked them questions than they did to somebody who shared their language and only ever used it to give orders. View quote
Iain Banks
Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard. View quote
Iain Banks
He looked up from it at the stars again, and the view was warped and distorted by something in his eyes, which at first he thought was rain. (Iain Banks)
I am told he is something of a scholar, which is no bad thing in a king, providing it is not taken to excess. View quote
Iain Banks
We only become beasts-we become worse than beasts-when we torment others. View quote
Iain Banks
Such a stupid act. Sometimes heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination, the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn't win medals but wars. View quote
Iain Banks
How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails. View quote
Iain Banks
On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system, which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel, and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take years and generations to manifest themselves. View quote
Iain Banks
There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means. View quote
Iain Banks
More than anything else now, though, he wanted to save Darckense. He had seen too many dead, dry eyes, too much air-blackened blood, too much fly-blown flesh, to be able to relate such ghastly truths to the nebulous ideas of honor and tradition that people claimed they were fighting for. Only the well-being of one loved person seemed really worth fighting for now; it was all that seemed real, all that could save his sanity. View quote
Iain Banks
Pain, or even just discomfort, is like the warning sent by a frontier guard, sir. You are free to choose to ignore it, but you should not be unduly surprised if you are subsequently over-run by invaders. View quote
Iain Banks
That was another thing she taught me. That you are what you do. To Providence-or Progress or the Future or before any other sort of judgment apart from our own conscience-what we have done, not what we have thought, is the result we are judged by. View quote
Iain Banks
No! Get away from me, you wittering purple rogues! Away and become bankers the lot of you-admit what you really love! (Iain Banks)
Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side. We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too. View quote
Iain Banks
The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them. View quote
Iain Banks
Destroying the whole universe' – an always tempting scenario when you realise in SF you can do anything – just seems too easy. View quote
Iain Banks
People often behave badly when they are trying to prove a point. View quote
Iain Banks