Surface Detail (Culture #9) QUOTES

1 " 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)

2 " An intelligence completely dissociated from the physical, or at least an impression of it, was a strange, curiously limited and almost perverse thing, and the precise form that your physicality took had a profound, in some ways defining influence on your personality. "

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

3 " The truth is not always useful, not always good. It’s like putting your faith in water. Yes, we need the rain, but too much can sweep you away in a flood and drown you. Like all great natural, elemental forces, the truth needs to be channeled, managed, controlled and intelligently, morally allocated. "

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

4 " Naturally, also, both sides were convinced they had right on their side, not that either was remotely naive enough to think that had any possible bearing on the outcome whatsoever. "

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

5 " Though drones, avatars and even humans are one thing; the loss of any is not without moral and diplomatic import, of course, but might be dismissed as merely unfortunate and regrettable, something to be smoothed over through the usual channels. Attacking a ship, on the other hand, is an unambiguous act of war. "

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

6 " All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. "

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

7 " He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones. "

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

8 " Insult, like many such feelings, is experienced in the soul of the person addressed; it is not something that can be granted or withheld by the person doing the addressing. "

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

9 " Almost every developing species had a creation myth buried somewhere in its past, even if by the time they’d become space-faring it was no more than a quaint and dusty irrelevance (though, granted, some were downright embarrassing). Talking utter drivel about thunderclouds having sex with the sun, lonely old sadists inventing something to amuse themselves with, a big fish spawning the stars, planets, moons and your own ever-so-special People – or whatever other nonsense had wandered into the most likely feverish mind of the enthusiast who had come up with the idea in the first place – at least showed you were interested in trying to provide an explanation for the world around you, and so was generally held to be a promising first step towards coming up with the belief system that provably worked and genuinely did produce miracles: reason, science and technology. "

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

10 " The majority of species, too, could scrape together some sort of metaphysical framework, a form of earlier speculation – semi-deranged or otherwise – regarding the way things worked at a fundamental level which could later be held up as a philosophy, life-rule system or genuine religion, especially if one used the excuse that it was really only a metaphor, no matter how literally true it had declared itself to be originally. "

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

11 " Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn’t stop his attention from wandering. The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their real worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detail. When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth. "

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

12 " Shut up!” Bettlescroy shouted, one tiny fist thudding down on the desk beneath the screen. “The Culture vessel has also already worked out how to get the fabricaria-built ships to set about destroying each other, which might result in the ships annihilating themselves even quicker; within a matter of hours. It would appear only to be holding back from this course because it fears some of the ships might accidentally or mistakenly damage the fabricaria, a consequence it wishes to avoid if possible, to preserve the – and I quote – ‘unique techno-cultural monument that is the Tsungarial Disk’. That’s so thoughtful, don’t you think that’s so thoughtful? I think that’s so fucking thoughtful. "

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

13 " Don’t you think it’s hilarious when people think they’re being terribly clever? I know I do. Just as well some of us genuinely fucking are or we’d be in a hell of a fucking state. "

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

14 " long sweeping swathes of darkly torrential rain. "

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

15 " Even as a raft, of course, it could have been made from gold, or any element with a molecular number lower than mercury. Lead would still sink in mercury, but gold shouldn’t. It was one number down the Periodic Table and so ought to float. Veppers looked over the side of the vessel at where his ingot of gold had entered the liquid metal, but it showed no sign of surfacing yet. "

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

16 " All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy. Nothing was ever identical to anything else because it didn’t share the same spacial coordinates; nothing could be identical to anything else because you couldn’t share the property of uniqueness. "

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

17 " that was a tough position to hold when at the back of your mind was the niggling doubt that you really might not be saved when the time came, while at the back of everybody else’s mind was a little device that was guaranteed to do precisely that. "

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

18 " what passed for useful information sharing within an organization was really just bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for upcoming failures and calamities, that were both entirely predictable, but seemingly completely unavoidable and telling each other what they all already knew. The trick was to be able to reengage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know that you stopped listening properly, shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth. "

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

19 " We’re losing, he thought again. There is a war in heaven and we are losing it. The war was amongst the Heavens, between the Afterlives, if you wanted to be pedantic about it. And it was over the Hells. "

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

20 " at least showed you were interested in trying to provide an explanation for the world around you, and so was generally held to be a promising first step towards coming up with the belief system that provably worked and genuinely did produce miracles: reason, science and technology. "

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