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Iain M. Banks QUOTES

1 " Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists, Mr. Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you? "

― Iain M. Banks , Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

2 " The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't. "

― Iain M. Banks

3 " The History Of The Universe In Three Words

CHAPTER ONE
Bang!

CHAPTER TWO
sssss

CHAPTER THREE
crunch.

THE END "

― Iain M. Banks

4 " ...for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not yet fully woken up, and events within its sleek hull still moved to another, slower tempo, made half of dreams. "

― Iain M. Banks , The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

5 " What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis on mutation, struggle and death? That conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition? "

― Iain M. Banks , The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

6 " A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the head of every one of their flock, for ever. "

― Iain M. Banks

7 " ...a guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximize that effect, and some try to minimize it. You come from one of the latter and you’re being asked to explain yourself to one of the former. Prevarication will be more difficult than you might imagine; neutrality is probably impossible. You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence. I know that and they know that; you had better accept it. "

― Iain M. Banks

8 " The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea remotely seriously. "

― Iain M. Banks , Surface Detail (Culture #9)

9 " Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying all this wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness. "

― Iain M. Banks , Matter (Culture, #8)

10 " One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher. "

― Iain M. Banks , Inversions (Culture, #6)

Iain M. Banks QUOTES

11 " [M]y determined and strenuous endeavours to take in absolutely nothing of what I had regarded as entirely the most irrelevant part of my schooling had patently not met with total success "

― Iain M. Banks , Inversions (Culture, #6)

12 " I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away. "

― Iain M. Banks , Look to Windward (Culture, #7)

13 " [T]here can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered. "

― Iain M. Banks , Look to Windward (Culture, #7)

14 " Lying here, during all this time after my own small fall, it has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We’ll pluck significance from the least consequential happenstance if it suits us and happily ignore the most flagrantly obvious symmetry between separate aspects of our lives if it threatens some cherished prejudice or cosily comforting belief; we are blindest to precisely whatever might be most illuminating. "

― Iain M. Banks , Transition

15 " [I]t would be a niceness that was enforced leniently, patiently and gracefully, with the sort of unflappable self-certainty [they] couldn't help displaying when all its statistics proved that it really was doing the right thing. "

― Iain M. Banks

16 " Darkness came like a black flag waved over the canyon, drawing back the grayness from the shores of the city, then pushing forward the individual specks of street and building lights as though in recompense. "

― Iain M. Banks , Use of Weapons (Culture, #3)

17 " the ignobility of thought and action that desperation born of indigence produces. "

― Iain M. Banks , Excession (Culture, #5)

18 " You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at the top of some steps in the courtyard where Linter's place was, and I looked across it and there was a little notice on the wall saying it was forbidden to take photographs of the courtyard without the man's permission. [..] They want to own the light! "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

19 " Hey, Wrobik; cheer up, yeah? You're going to shoot down a fucking starship. It'll be an experience. "

― Iain M. Banks , The State of the Art (Culture, #4)

20 " By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films. "

― Iain M. Banks