Iain's Quotes

#1. Judith took a deep breath. "Aye, you captured Iain's wife," she said again. "But he married your daughter.

Julie Garwood

#2. I felt tears coming and for some reason, buried my head in Iain's chest. It was firm and muscled and he smelt so wonderful.
I realised what I was doing and pulled away, but a big string of snot hung between my nose and his shirt pocket.

Robert Bryndza

#3. Draw every bad word you've ever called yourself on your body. Stand in the shower and pay attention to the way the words turn back into ink and disappear down the drain.

Iain S. Thomas

#4. It's always only ever been you. And it always will be, Beth. You have my heart. My love. And my regret that I am not the man you deserve.

Charlotte Featherstone

#5. What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn't lead to wisdom? And what's wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?

Iain Banks

#6. Getting comprehensively lost in a car with a full tank of petrol at someone else's expense, you can't beat it.

Iain Sinclair

#7. It's like a sealed, forgotten chamber in me; I shan't feel complete until I've discovered its entrance.'
'Sounds like a tomb. Aren't you afraid of what you'll find in there?'
'It's a library; only the stupid and the evil are afraid of those.

Iain Banks

#8. All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.

Iain Banks

#9. I think he likes it. He fits in with our ethos. He's a good worker and is an excellent pro. Thank goodness he likes his training or else he wouldn't settle here.

Iain Dowie

#10. Why not add another yarn? That's all we are in the end, any of us, a couple of dozen unreliable stories.

Iain Sinclair

#11. It's now much more 50-50 in favour of Everton.

Iain Dowie

#12. There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.

Iain Banks

#13. If you really want to know, I just hope I die before I get boring.

Iain S. Thomas

#14. We have to challenge the whole idea that it's acceptable for a society like Britain to have such a significant number of people who do not work one day of the week and don't have any possibility of improving the quality of their lives.

Iain Duncan Smith

#15. You can be so much in a room that the world outside turns to water. You've got the heater blowing out burnt air, but you still don't get warm. Your ankles are singed, but your head's in a bucket of ice. Time drips like a stalactite. The water for the coffee boils away in a tree of steam.

Iain Sinclair

#16. It's fairness to say those who work hard, get up in the morning, cut their cloth - in other words 'we can only afford to have one or two children because we don't earn enough'. They pay their taxes and they want to know that the same kind of decision-making is taking place for those on benefits.

Iain Duncan Smith

#17. Getting a family into work, supporting strong relationships, getting parents off drugs and out of debt - all this can do more for a child's well-being than any amount of money in out-of-work benefits.

Iain Duncan Smith

#18. 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

#19. I hope that if love hurts, it teaches you something about yourself or about someone else.

Iain S. Thomas

#20. Let's be clear: unless I have profoundly misunderstood its position, I pretty much despise American Libertarianism. Have these people seriously looked at the problems of the world and thought, 'Hmm, what we need here is a bit more selfishness'? . . . I beg to differ.

Iain Banks

#21. Sometimes I have a weird dream that we're all relatively brief sparks of consciousness that live on a rock circling a ball of fire.

Iain S. Thomas

#22. I monitor the food my players eat on a Friday night. It's no good if they've had two vindaloos and a kebab.

Iain Dowie

#23. I hope you love whenever you're given the chance to love.

Iain S. Thomas

#24. A man becomes his thoughts and these are now yours.

Iain S. Thomas

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. I don't feel proprietary, but I do feel there is a human identity to the borough of Hackney that's quite peculiar. It was always bloody-minded and difficult; it always stood up to central government.

Iain Sinclair

#28. Individual is obsolete. That's why life is so comfortable for us all. We don't matter, so we're safe. No one person can have any real effect anymore.

Iain M. Banks

#29. I think a lot of people are frightened of technology and frightened of change, and the way to deal with something you're frightened of is to make fun of it. That's why science fiction fans are dismissed as geeks and nerds.

Iain Banks

#30. There are some real positives for Wales. Their back four's not bad, sometimes.

Iain Dowie

#31. The human genome contains so much data that, it has been calculated, it would fill 43 volumes of Webster's International Dictionary.

Iain McGilchrist

#32. Poor Eric came home to see his brother, only to find (Zap!Pow!Dams burst!Bombs go off!Wasps fry:ttssss!) he's got a sister.

Iain Banks

#33. Never apologize for how you feel. No one can control how they feel. The sun doesn't apologize for being the sun. The rain doesn't say sorry for falling. Feelings just are

Iain S. Thomas

#34. In so much of politics you're not allowed to disagree with what's been agreed.

Iain Banks

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. The world changes, but I want that change to be necessary or respectful of what has happened before. Everything changes, and that's quite right.

Iain Sinclair

#38. Everyone changes so slowly, they don't even know that they have. And everyone likes to pretend that things are just the same yet they look at you like you could bring something back that's supposed to already be here. But home is a time. Not just a place.

Iain Thomas

#39. You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.

Iain Banks

#40. There is no prose as inspiring as a single human being with the courage to live well.

Iain S. Thomas

#41. For years, my life has been flat. I'm not sure how else to describe it. I've never admitted it before. I'm not depressed, I don't think. That's not what I'm saying. Just flat, listless. So much has felt accidental, unnecessary, arbitrary. It's been lacking a dimension. Something seems to be missing.

Iain Reid

#42. She was looking for something I could never give her." Again his dark eyes bored into Julia's mind. "You have something of the same about you, young woman. Take my advice: Don't think you will find it in another person. You won't. It's not there. You must find it in yourself.

Iain Pears

#43. Now if only I could do something about my neurosis that forces me to narrate my life out loud for everyone to hear, I said, to no one in particular.

Iain S. Thomas

#44. That's what it feels like when you touch me. Like millions of tiny universes being born and then dying in the space between your finger and my skin. Sometimes I forget.

Iain Thomas

#45. Even in my side of the world, I've been in publishing for what, 25 or 26 years, and it's gone from being a gentlemen's club to being a few big players, and it's very corporatised.

Iain Banks

#46. There was a research article I read with the headline, "Love Is A Single Act Committed By Two Brains," because of the way oxytocin levels rose in a mother and a son when they hugged. I wish more poets became scientists

Iain S. Thomas

#47. When the news is good, the BBC view is: 'Get the government out of the picture quickly, don't allow them to say anything about it.' When the news is bad: 'Let's all dump on the government.'

Iain Duncan Smith

#48. Somewhere across the interstate
Exposure to the drug trade of emotions
And the tsunami and typhoon of feelings
Has made us all cops and robbers
Of what we keep in the cavities
In our chests

Iain S. Thomas

#49. It's a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those

Iain Banks

#50. 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

#51. ... No matter what happens to me, watch over her."

"You needn't ask. You ken I will--wi' my life."

"My love lies upon her."

Iain grinned. "And her's upon you. I can see it. Now go to her."

-Iain and Morgan

Pamela Clare

#52. This is why it hurts the way it hurts.
You have too many words in your head. There are too many ways to describe the way you feel. You will never have the luxury of a dull ache.
You must suffer through the intricacy of feeling too much

Iain S. Thomas

#53. There's this sloth in the jungle walking from one tree to another, and it's mugged by a gang of snails, and when the police ask the sloth if it could identify any of its attackers, it says, 'I don't know; it all happened so quickly...

Iain Banks

#54. Your nerve endings
I know their plot
To attack
My never endings
Until we fall asleep
In each other's arms

Iain S. Thomas

#55. 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

#56. I hope you discover that love is both a feeling and an action, like light is both a particle and a wave.

Iain S. Thomas

#57. There is an obvious connection, on the declining Roman empire's bread and circuses model, between political enthusiasm for public spectacles and the periods when we are least able to pay for them.

Iain Sinclair

#58. Ancient, vicious, discredited ideas backed with adolescent war mania. It's

Iain M. Banks

#59. 'Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa.

Iain Banks

#60. The problem with the chemicals in my head is they lead to feelings in the rest of me.

Iain S. Thomas

#61. I need you to understand something. I wrote this for you. I wrote this for you and only you. Everyone else who reads it, doesn't get it. They may think they get it, but they don't. This is the sign you've been looking for. You were meant to read these words.

Iain S. Thomas

#62. The conversation between your fingers and someone else's skin. This is the most important discussion you can ever have.

Iain Thomas

#63. History is a series of difficult choices. The only reason there's anything left of the human race, the only reason we're still here is because men like me made those difficult choices

Iain S. Thomas

#64. We may need to learn how to lament and weep before the Lord and recognize our sins and those of our fellow Christians that have caused God to depart from our midst. In the midst of the pain of our lamentation, however, our confidence may yet be placed in God's faithfulness. As

Iain M. Duguid

#65. All too often, government's response to social breakdown has been a classic case of 'patching' - a case of handing money out, containing problems and limiting the damage but, in doing so, supporting - even reinforcing - dysfunctional behaviour.

Iain Duncan Smith

#66. She was real to me. And while I can be logical about this, logic has never once mended a broken heart or fixed a sundered soul. She has poisoned the very core of me. A dream has killed me

Iain S. Thomas

#67. The genome was once thought to be just the blueprint for a living organism, like a combination of the architect's plan for a building and the builder's list of supplies. It specified the parts, the building blocks, and, somehow, the design of the whole, the way in which they are to be put together.

Iain McGilchrist

#68. you weren't mine to begin with.

Iain S. Thomas

#69. ...drunk enough on earth's liquors to relish the prospect of the knife.

Iain Sinclair

#70. You want to watch him, Julia," he told me. "He may look harmless enough, but appearances can be deceiving." Geoff grinned. "That's slander, that is. You know I always behave like a perfect gentleman." "Right then, Sir Galahad," Iain said dryly.

Susanna Kearsley

#71. Everyone just kind of leans their expectations of who you are on you and it makes you petrified of who you really might be.

Iain S. Thomas

#72. 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

#73. You are well within your rights to stand up, interrupt everyone around you and say, 'This is not who I am. This is not what I want. I'm sorry, but you've mistaken me for somebody else.

Iain S. Thomas

#74. I like to think that somewhere out there, on a planet exactly like ours, two people exactly like you and me made totally different choices and that, somewhere, we're still together. That's enough for me.

Iain Thomas

#75. I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

Iain Banks

#76. then there's nothing worse I can wish on you than to be exactly the fuckhead you so obviously are.

Iain M. Banks

#77. It never ceased to amaze him how quickly a small child's face could turn from peach to beetroot.

Iain Banks

#78. I thought a bit of poetry might be interesting - I even write a few lines myself. I composed a short poem for my mum's 70th birthday recently. When I recited it I saw the glint of a tear in her eye ... although I guess it wasn't the quality of the poetry was that making her cry!

Iain Dowie

#79. 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

#80. The feeling you get when you think of something amazing and then forget it and know that it felt amazing but you cant remember the details. Then, minutes later, you remember it again and you're so grateful because you nearly lost something, forever. Except, this time, its a person. Not an idea.

Iain S. Thomas

#81. Good. Now let's go down to the pub and meet the townsfolk," Iain said.
"Bar," Euann corrected, just to be contrary.
"Let's go down to the pub before I hit ya with a bar," Iain said.

Michelle M. Pillow

#82. My personal view is always I'm in favour of anything that gives parliament a greater say. That's after all what we were elected for.

Iain Duncan Smith

#83. You're a wicked man." "Thank you. It's taken years of diligent practice.

Iain Banks

#84. Hersesy is denying the word of God, and the word of God is much more reliably expressed in the natural world as it's revealed through reason and science than in what I have heard described wonderfully as the giant book of Jewish fairy stories

Iain Banks

#85. I deliberately keep myself apart from a lot of stuff; I don't Tweet, I don't do Facebook, I don't blog, and that's largely because I spend my working life staring at a screen and hitting a keyboard, I am trying to cut down on that, not increase it.

Iain Banks

#86. I don't know anyone who's suffered lung cancer.

Iain Glen

#87. If you are lucky, one day you'll get the chance to have your life defined by how much you loved and were loved by someone else.

Iain S. Thomas

#88. Like the aristocracy, you can tell a reporter's status by his clothes and manners. The worse they are, the higher up they are,

Iain Pears

#89. I don't think you really belong here, Aviger." Xoxarle nodded wisely, slowly.
Aviger shrugged, and did not raise his eyes. "I don't think any of us do."
"The brave belong where they decide." Some harshness entered the Idiran's voice.

Iain Banks

#90. It's just a freak of fate that I'm paid to write, not paying to print my own books - but I'd be doing it anyway: it's my life.

Iain Sinclair

#91. We're not in prison, we're not junkies and we're not Young Tories ... it's no small achievement.

Iain Banks

#92. Elsewhere are two letters that were never sent, because of pride, each a declaration of love that would've changed lives

Iain S. Thomas

#93. 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

#94. It's not the things you don't want that drag you under. It's the things you think you want.
Those, are the killers.

Iain S. Thomas

#95. What about artists who aren't nice people? They're just nice people who cared too much for a person or a world that hurt them too much. So now they chase the world and people away.

Iain S. Thomas

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. This is my skin. It keeps out the rain and words I'd rather not hear like "I'm tired" or "I'm fine" or "We need to talk."
This is my skin and it's thick. This is not your skin. Yet you are still under it.

Iain S. Thomas