Top 100 Iain M. Banks Quotes
#1. [I]f I suffered only one fool gladly, I assure you it would be you.
Iain M. Banks
#2. Faith is belief without reason; we operate on reason and nothing but. I have zero faith in my crew, just absolute confidence.
Iain M. Banks
#3. 5126We are a mongrel race, our past a history of tangles, our sources obscure, our rowdy upbringing full of greedy, short-sighted empires and cruel, wasteful diasporas.
Iain M. Banks
#4. All reality seemed to hinge on those infinitesimal bundles of meaning.
Iain M. Banks
#5. Well, in the end, there was no helping this. Sometimes you just had to adopt the attitude summed up by, Too bad.
Iain M. Banks
#6. Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.
Iain M. Banks
#7. Conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?
Iain M. Banks
#8. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?
Iain M. Banks
#9. First person singular obtaining colloquial orgasm within a Caledonian sandwich' it said, then looked annoyed, and spoke incoherently into a grille set in its belly which replied. It looked up and said, 'Sorry, as I was saying: I come in peace
Iain M. Banks
#10. I had high hopes for that girl, but too much of that sort of nonsense and I think her intelligence will explosively dismantle
Iain M. Banks
#11. Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you're not doing it right.
Iain M. Banks
#12. the battle-memes of the invading alien consciousness aided by the thought processes and shared knowledge of the by now obviously completely overwhelmed ship. With
Iain M. Banks
#13. The Idirans themselves had evolved on their planet Idir as the top monster from a whole planetful of monsters.
Iain M. Banks
#14. But just because something does not have an ending doesn't mean it doesn't have a conclusion.
Iain M. Banks
#16. In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after word until he had something that looked like a poem. This was how he imagined poetry to be made.
Iain M. Banks
#18. The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual assassins of the new Yearking's immediate family by drowning them in the tears of the Continental Empathaur in its Sadness Season.
Iain M. Banks
#20. The ignobility of thought and action that desperation born of indigence produces.
Iain M. Banks
#21. Because I do enjoy winning, because I do have something nobody can copy, something nobody else can have; I'm me; I'm one of the best.
Iain M. Banks
#22. The smell was that of a sewer under an abattoir.
Iain M. Banks
#23. That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place." He
Iain M. Banks
#25. He might come in useful.'
'Yeah. So's a broken leg if you want to kick yourself in the back of the head.
Iain M. Banks
#26. All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now.
Iain M. Banks
#27. Obsession is just what those too timorous to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion call determination.
Iain M. Banks
#28. Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you're told you deserve whatever you get.
Iain M. Banks
#29. The set-up assumes that the game and life are the same thing, and such is the pervasive nature of the idea of the game within the society that just by believing that, they make it so.
Iain M. Banks
#30. To touch this abomination with anything less perfectly attuned to its nature than the carefully dispersed wings of an engine field would be like an ancient, fragile rocket ship falling into a sun, like a wooden sea-ship encountering an atomic blast.
Iain M. Banks
#31. All these people seemed to do was talk! It supposed it was just what biologicals did. If you wanted to feel you were still somehow in control of a ship or a fleet or even your civilisation, talking amongst yourselves seemed to be the way you convinced yourself of it. Finally
Iain M. Banks
#32. I'm a fucking razor-arsed starship, you maniac! I'm not male, female or anything else except stupendously smart and right now tuned to smite. I don't give a fuck about flattering you. The few and frankly not vitally important sentiments I have concerning you I can switch off like flicking a switch.
Iain M. Banks
#33. Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We've spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refining the legacy of a won galactic war.
Iain M. Banks
#34. It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky.
Iain M. Banks
#35. [A]ll her hardships had been self-inflicted and recreational in the past.
Iain M. Banks
#36. Behind it, still expanding, still radiating, still slowly dissolving in the system to which it had given its name, the unnumbered twinkling fragments of the Orbital called Vavatch blew out toward the stars, drifting on a stellar wind that rang and swirled with the fury of the world's destruction.
Iain M. Banks
#37. He wasn't sure himself why he was pulling his punches in this way, but somehow it seemed important not to let Contact know everything, to keep something back. It was a small victory against them a little-game, a gesture on a lesser board; a blow against the elements and the gods.
Iain M. Banks
#38. It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
She laughed. 'Really?'
The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. 'Oh, no. It's just something we tell ourselves.
Iain M. Banks
#39. She was one of the unfortunates trying to get some sort of human grasp of Earth's economics, and deserved all the light relief she could get. I recall that all through that year you could tell the economists by their distraught look and slightly glazed-looking eyes.
Iain M. Banks
#40. He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.
Iain M. Banks
#41. I knew I might die, but I was prepared to risk that; it was almost romantic. Somehow it never occurred to me it might entail privation and suffering.
Iain M. Banks
#42. The swirling mist lay in the bottom of such great bowls like a broth of dreams.
Iain M. Banks
#43. Sometimes what goes without saying is best said anyway.
Iain M. Banks
#44. It was rude, insulting and frequently infuriating, but it made such a refreshing change from the awful politeness of most people.
Iain M. Banks
#45. 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.
Iain M. Banks
#46. Holse wasn't about to get involved in any theological arguments. He looked serious and nodded, hoping this would do.
Iain M. Banks
#47. So basically you're sticking around to watch us all fuck up ?"
"Yes. It's one of life's few guaranteed constants.
Iain M. Banks
#48. Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess.
Iain M. Banks
#49. There was something comforting about having a vast hydrogen furnace burning millions of tons of material a second at the centre of a solar system. It was cheery.
Iain M. Banks
#50. [M]aking a show was better cover than trying to stay inconspicuous; Western capitalism in particular allowed the rich just about the right amount of behavioural leeway to account for the oddities our alienness might produce.
Iain M. Banks
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. We are a race prone to monsters, she thought, and when we produce one we worship it.
Iain M. Banks
#55. So how many infants have to grow up under the shadow of the mushroom cloud, and just possibly die screaming inside the radioactive rubble, just for us to be sure we're doing the right thing? How certain do we have to be? How long must we wait? How long must we make them wait? Who elected us God?
Iain M. Banks
#57. Just because that was the start of a thousand sentimental stories didn't mean that it didn't actually happen.
Iain M. Banks
#58. Twice, in the depths of the sleeping ship, he almost killed somebody. One of those times, it was somebody else,
Iain M. Banks
#59. I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was at the moment.
Iain M. Banks
#60. And in all of this, to what end?" "No end save itself: I pass the time to pass the time, and stay involved to stay involved." "Yes, but why?" "Why not?
Iain M. Banks
#61. But such consummate skill, such ability, such adaptability, such numbing ruthlessness, such a use of weapons when anything could become weapon . . .
Iain M. Banks
#62. Like a berserk raptor thrown into a nest of hibernating kittens ...
Iain M. Banks
#63. Unbelievable. I'm in a fucking Outside Context situation, the ship thought, and suddenly felt as stupid and dumb-struck as any muddy savage confronted with explosives or electricity.
Iain M. Banks
#64. The ball itself was for over a thousand people, about half of them game-players; the rest were mostly partners of the players, or officials, priests, officers and bureaucrats who
Iain M. Banks
#65. One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he's a genius.
Iain M. Banks
#66. 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
#67. Part of the training of a Special Circumstances agent was learning a) that the rules were supposed to be broken sometimes, b) just how to go about breaking the rules, and c) how to get away with it, whether the rule-breaking had led to a successful outcome or not.
Iain M. Banks
#68. no matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if your heart just gave out . . . That
Iain M. Banks
#69. Somehow, later, exhausted and dismayed by these sapping, abrasive, attriting episodes, they came to a sort of truce; but it was at the expense of any closeness.
Iain M. Banks
#70. one may be partially owned by another or others by having to sell one's labor or talents to somebody with the means to buy them. In
Iain M. Banks
#71. But then, as she knew too well, the more fondly we imagine something will last forever, the more ephemeral it often proves to be.
Iain M. Banks
#72. [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
#73. The game's the thing. That's the conventional wisdom, isn't it? The fun is what matters, not the victory. To glory in the defeat of another, to need that purchased pride, is to show you are incomplete and inadequate to start with.
Iain M. Banks
#74. They sought to take the unfairness out of existence, to remove the mistakes in the transmitted message of life which gave it any point or advancement ...
Iain M. Banks
#75. A very patient voice. Concerned, somehow, but a hopeful voice; a cheerful, even loving voice. He tried to remember his mother. 'Cheradenine?' the voice said again. Trying to get him to wake up. But he was awake. He tried moving his lips.
Iain M. Banks
#76. Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean towards the latter.
Iain M. Banks
#77. They also,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, 'refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value; carbon fascists.
Iain M. Banks
#78. It also occurred to him that Minds wrote voluminous biographies of each other in order to cover the odd potentially valuable or embarrassing nugget of truth under a mountain of bullshit.
Iain M. Banks
#79. He would give up then and console himself with something she'd said. That you could not love what you fully understood. "Love, she maintained, was a process, not a state. Held still, it withered".
Iain M. Banks
#80. 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 the rules.
Iain M. Banks
#81. There came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.
Iain M. Banks
#82. The birds disturbed from the network of waterways beneath the barges wheeled in the sky, calling plaintively.
Iain M. Banks
#83. A Mind could hold any set of facts and opinions it wanted without having to tell anybody what it knew or thought, or why.
Iain M. Banks
#84. [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
#85. Happily, I am not human, Parinherm thought, and this is only a simulation.
Iain M. Banks
#86. One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve.
Iain M. Banks
#87. The Fate had moved, or had been moved, thirty light years in less than a picosecond.
Iain M. Banks
#88. The good soldier did as he was told, and if he had any sense at all volunteered for nothing, especially promotion.
Iain M. Banks
#89. Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.
Iain M. Banks
#90. Rules and laws exist only because we take pleasure in doing what they forbid, but as long as most of the people obey such proscriptions most of the time, they have done their job.
Iain M. Banks
#91. Some problems were generational; you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types.
Iain M. Banks
#92. it was the night when people got paid and didn't have to work the next day, and so by tradition went out to get drunk and into fights. Then
Iain M. Banks
#93. Very little matters very much and almost nothing matters greatly.
Iain M. Banks
#95. What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet?
It would be appropriate.
When in Rome; burn it.
Iain M. Banks
#96. just one more species, which would grow and expand and then, finding the plateau phase all non-suicidal species eventually arrived at, settle down.
Iain M. Banks
#97. Bob-nodded toward the open module door. After you.
Iain M. Banks
#98. 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
#100. It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders." "Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civilizationally.
Iain M. Banks
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