Top 100 Iain M Banks Quotes
#1. Fictional realms are usually terrible places to vacation, as they tend to be full of monsters and conflicts - Narnia and Middle-earth would both be good places to get killed - but I wouldn't mind visiting the worlds of Iain M. Banks's 'Culture.' You'd just have a hard time getting me to leave.
Tim Pratt
#2. 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
#3. Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess.
Iain M. Banks
#4. Holse wasn't about to get involved in any theological arguments. He looked serious and nodded, hoping this would do.
Iain M. Banks
#5. 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
#6. It was rude, insulting and frequently infuriating, but it made such a refreshing change from the awful politeness of most people.
Iain M. Banks
#7. Sometimes what goes without saying is best said anyway.
Iain M. Banks
#8. The swirling mist lay in the bottom of such great bowls like a broth of dreams.
Iain M. Banks
#9. 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
#10. He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.
Iain M. Banks
#11. The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.
Iain M. Banks
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. [A]ll her hardships had been self-inflicted and recreational in the past.
Iain M. Banks
#17. 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
#18. In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it.
Iain M. Banks
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Obsession is just what those too timorous to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion call determination.
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. Thing about emergencies," he said, sounding weary. "Rarely occur when they'd be convenient.
Iain M. Banks
#28. I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and among those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.
Iain M. Banks
#29. But such consummate skill, such ability, such adaptability, such numbing ruthlessness, such a use of weapons when anything could become weapon . . .
Iain M. Banks
#30. 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
#31. [T]here can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered.
Iain M. Banks
#32. I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was at the moment.
Iain M. Banks
#33. Twice, in the depths of the sleeping ship, he almost killed somebody. One of those times, it was somebody else,
Iain M. Banks
#34. He felt great. spa'dassins digladiate; ziffidae and xebecs contend! gol-iard dunking!
Iain M. Banks
#35. Just because that was the start of a thousand sentimental stories didn't mean that it didn't actually happen.
Iain M. Banks
#37. 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
#38. We are a race prone to monsters, she thought, and when we produce one we worship it.
Iain M. Banks
#39. The History Of The Universe In Three Words
CHAPTER ONE
Bang!
CHAPTER TWO
sssss
CHAPTER THREE
crunch.
THE END
Iain M. Banks
#40. 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
#42. Perdition awaits at the end of a road constructed entirely from good intentions, the devil emerges from the details and hell abides in the small print.
Iain M. Banks
#43. 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
#44. It seemed perverse to some, but for all their apparent militarism the Gzilt had remained peaceful over many millenia; it was the avowedly peaceful Culture that had , within living memory, taken part in an all-out galactic war against another civilisation.
Iain M. Banks
#45. 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
#47. [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
#48. Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.
Iain M. Banks
#49. Strange that people are happy to adopt epithets they would fight to the death to throw off had they been imposed.
Iain M. Banks
#50. 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
#51. Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I'm not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness, perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows time is on his side.
Iain Banks
#52. All reality seemed to hinge on those infinitesimal bundles of meaning.
Iain M. Banks
#53. 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
#54. Ulver Seich woke up in the best possible way. She surfaced with a languorous slowness through fuzzy layers of luxurious half-dreams and memories of sweetness, sensuality and sheer carnal bliss ... to find it all merging rather splendidly into reality, and what was happening right now.
Iain M. Banks
#55. 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
#56. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?
Iain M. Banks
#57. Conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?
Iain M. Banks
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. It meant something to climb, to haul this sack of bones and flesh all this way, and then look, then think, then be. She could have taken a flyer here any time when she'd been recovering, but she hadn't, even though Jase had suggested it. That was too easy. Being here wouldn't have meant anything.
Iain M. Banks
#61. He felt the slowly healing polarization of his mind, matching his to hers, the alignment of all his prejudices and conceits to the lodestone of the image she represented for him.
Iain M. Banks
#62. I've always loved Scotland, and I'm not a huge fan of big cities, to be honest. I like them to dip into for a bit, but I'm not sure I would want to live in one again.
Iain Banks
#63. I'm from out of town, he said breezily. This was true. He'd never been within a hundred light-years of the place.
Iain Banks
#64. You might call them soft, because they're very reluctant to kill, and they might agree with you, but they're soft the way the ocean is soft, and, well; ask any sea captain how harmless and puny the ocean can be.
Iain M. Banks
#65. Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you're not doing it right.
Iain M. Banks
#66. Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!
Iain M. Banks
#68. the rich just bribe their way out. So yes, as far as the rulers are concerned, it works.
Iain M. Banks
#69. Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.
Iain M. Banks
#70. had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was like at the moment,
Iain M. Banks
#71. 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
#72. then there's nothing worse I can wish on you than to be exactly the fuckhead you so obviously are.
Iain M. Banks
#73. I'm an only child so am happy with my own company and I don't really get lonely.
Iain Banks
#74. 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
#75. I'm not a great believer in awards-of course the fact that I've never won one has nothing to do with it at all!
Iain Banks
#76. [I]f I suffered only one fool gladly, I assure you it would be you.
Iain M. Banks
#77. 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
#78. The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into being: the urge not to feel useless.
Iain M. Banks
#80. 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 know there are still things they don't know, things that can still go wrong, things they can still do wrong.
Iain M. Banks
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. The smell was that of a sewer under an abattoir.
Iain M. Banks
#84. Myself," said the drone sniffily, "I have never been able to see what virtue there could be in something that was eighty percent water.
Iain M. Banks
#85. 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
#86. And was taken to the Forward Docks and a big, brightly lit hangar, where the Psychopath Class ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views was waiting for her. Ulver laughed. 'It looks,' she snorted, 'like a dildo!' 'That's appropriate,' Churt Lyne said. 'Armed, it can fuck solar systems.
Iain M. Banks
#87. The ignobility of thought and action that desperation born of indigence produces.
Iain M. Banks
#89. It was clear that the delight being taken ... was not the vicarious pleasure of watching people enjoying themselves and identifying with them, but in seeing people being humiliated while others enjoyed themselves at their expense.
Iain M. Banks
#91. Meanwhile the Mind of Pittance watched over them, and looked out into the resounding silence and the sun-freckled darkness of the spaces between the stars, forever content and ineffably satisfied with the absence of anything remotely interesting happening.
Iain M. Banks
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. How about," Yay said, "magnetic fields under the base material and magnetized islands floating over oceans? No ordinary land at all; just great floating lumps of rock with streams and lakes and vegetation and a few intrepid people; doesn't that sound more exciting?
Iain M. Banks
#95. It was the Culture's fault. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way which ensured they would not become enemies again. The
Iain M. Banks
#97. But just because something does not have an ending doesn't mean it doesn't have a conclusion.
Iain M. Banks
#98. Ancient, vicious, discredited ideas backed with adolescent war mania. It's
Iain M. Banks
#99. The Idirans themselves had evolved on their planet Idir as the top monster from a whole planetful of monsters.
Iain M. Banks
#100. 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
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