Iain M Banks quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Iain M Banks

Top Iain M Banks Quotes

Browse top 46 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Iain M Banks.

Favorite Iain M Banks Quotes

1. "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

2. "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

3. "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

4. "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

5. "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

6. "The bomb lives only as it is falling." ~ Iain M. Banks

7. "But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird . . . but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you.If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one." ~ Iain M. Banks

8. "If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!" ~ Iain M. Banks

9. "I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was at the moment." ~ Iain M. Banks

10. "Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present." ~ Iain M. Banks

11. "Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time." ~ Iain M. Banks

12. "the more fondly we imagine something will last forever, the more ephemeral it often proves to be" ~ Iain M. Banks

13. "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

14. "They're on a cusp; a highly heterogeneous but highly connected--and stressedly connected--civilization. I'm not sure that one approach could encompass the needs of their different systems. The particular stage of communication they're at, combining rapidity and selectivity, usually with something added to the signal and almost always with something missed out, means that what passes for truth often has to travel at the speed of failing memories, changing attitudes, and new generations. Even when this form of handicap is recognized all they ever try to do, as a rule, is codify it, tidy it up. Their attempts of filter become part of the noise, and they seem unable to bring any more thought to bear on the matter than that which leads them to try and simplify what can only be understood by coming to terms with its complexity." ~ Iain M. Banks

15. "As you say, DeWar, our shame comes from the comparison. We know we might be generous and compassionate and good, and could behave so, yet something else in our nature makes us otherwise." She smiled a small, empty smile. "Yes, I feel something I recognise as love. Something I remember, something I may discuss and mill and theorise over." She shook her head. "But it is not something I know. I am like a blind woman taking about how a tree must look, or a cloud. Love is something I have a dim memory of, the way someone who went blind in their early childhood might recall the sun, or the face of their mother. I know affection from my fellow whore-wives, DeWar, and I sense regard from you and feel some in return. I have a duty to the Protector, just as he feels he has a duty to me. As far as that goes, I am content. But love? That is for the living, and I am dead." ~ Iain M. Banks

16. "They speak very well of you".- "They speak very well of everybody."- "That so bad?"- "Yes. It means you can´t trust them." ~ Iain M. Banks

17. "The point is: what happens in heaven?''Unknowable wonderfulness?' 'Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn't represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.''If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances - and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse - then you don't have life after death; you just have death." ~ Iain M. Banks

18. "That is the way with all of your kind… It is how you are made; you must all strive to claw your way over the backs of your fellow humans during the short time you are permitted in the universe, breeding when you can, so that the strongest strain survive and the weakest die. I would no more blame you for that than I would try to convert some non-sentient carnivore to vegetarianism. You are all on your own side." ~ Iain M. Banks

19. "We are a race prone to monsters, she thought, and when we produce one we worship it." ~ Iain M. Banks

20. "Ferbin's father had had the same robustly pragmatic view of religion as he'd had of everything else. In his opinion, only the very poor and downtrodden really needed religion, to make their laborious lives more bearable. People craved self-importance; they longed to betold they mattered as individuals, not just as part of a mass of people or some historical process. They needed the reassurance that while their life might be hard, bitter and thankless, some reward would be theirs after death. Happily for the governing class, a well-formed faith also kept people from seeking their recompense in the here and now, through riot, insurrection or revolution." ~ Iain M. Banks

21. "But what if someone kills somebody else?"Gurgeh shrugged. "They're slap-droned.""Ah! This sounds more like it. What does that drone do?""Follows you around and makes sure you never do it again.""Is that all?""What more do you want? Social death, Hamin; you don't get invited to too many parties.""Ah; but in your Culture, can't you gatecrash?""I suppose so," Gurgeh conceded. "But nobody'd talk to you." ~ Iain M. Banks

22. "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

23. "He lay, often, looking at her sleeping face in the new light that fell in through the open walls of the strange house, and he stared at her skin and hair with his mouth open, transfixed by the quick stillness of her, struck dumb with the physical fact of her existence as though she was some careless star-thing that slept on quite unaware of its incandescent power; the casualness and ease with which she slept there amazed him; he couldn't believe that such beauty could survive without some superhumanly intense conscious effort." ~ Iain M. Banks

24. "I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway" - the man laughed - "people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And," the man said with a smile, "it's a good way of meeting people. So where are you from, anyway?" ~ Iain M. Banks

25. "You're saying nothing lasts forever, he heard the fellow whine. (Well, pretty trite, he thought.)No, he heard her say. I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and amongst those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.She went on talking after this, but he homed in on that. That was better, he thought. I liked that." ~ Iain M. Banks

26. "Vos vaisseaux se croient intelligents et conscients ! gloussa Hamin.C'est aussi une erreur assez communément répandue parmi certains de nos compatriotes humains." ~ Iain M. Banks

27. "His jaw was slack and his mouth open, and he wondered if perhaps he would drown eventually; drowned by the falling rain." ~ Iain M. Banks

28. "Yes," I said. "Temudjin Oh." I'd long got used to the fact that my Mongolian-extraction surname could cause some amusement amongst English speakers determined to extract a toll of discomfiture from somebody whose name was not as banal or as ugly as theirs. However, there was something about the way she pronounced it that immediately brought a blush to my cheeks. Perhaps the sunset would cover my embarassment." ~ Iain M. Banks

29. "What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?" ~ Iain M. Banks

30. "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

31. "Listen for somebody trying to talk to you....(Silence)This from that very pit of night, naked in the wasteland, the ice-wind moaning his only covering, alone in the freezing darkness under a sky of chill obsidian:)Whoever tried to talk to me? When did I ever listen? When was I ever other than just myself, caring only for myself?" ~ Iain M. Banks

32. "They were enemies, they had both been very close to death and the other had done little or nothing to intervene, but actually to kill her would be very difficult.Or maybe he only wanted to pretend that he would find it very difficult; maybe it would be no bother at all, and the sort of bogus camaraderie of doing the same job, though on different sides, was just that: a fake." ~ Iain M. Banks

33. "conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?" ~ Iain M. Banks

34. "Concerned, somehow, but a hopeful voice; a cheerful, even loving voice. He tried to remember his mother. ‘Cheradenine?' the voice said again." ~ Iain M. Banks

35. "The Xinthia were regarded with something approaching affection by even the most ruthless and unsentimental of the galaxy's Involved, partly because they had done much great work in the past – they had been particularly active in the Swarm Wars of great antiquity, battling runaway nanotech outbreaks, Swarmata in general and other Monopathic Hegemonising Events – but mostly because they were no threat to anybody any more and a system of the galactic community's size and complexity just seemed to need one grouping that everybody was allowed to like. Utterly ancient, once near-invincibly powerful, now reduced to one paltry solar system and a few eccentric individuals hiding in the Cores of Shellworlds for no discernible reason, the Xinthia were seen as eccentric, bumbling, well-meaning, civilisationally exhausted – the joke was they hadn't the energy to Sublime – and generally as the honoured good-as-dead deserving of a comfortable retirement." ~ Iain M. Banks

36. "The Idirans themselves had evolved on their planet Idir as the top monster from a whole planetful of monsters." ~ Iain M. Banks

37. "Once one survives the trough that comes with the understanding that people are going to go on being stupid and cruel to each other no matter what, probably for ever – if one survives; many people choose suicide at this point instead – then one starts to take the attitude, Oh well, never mind." ~ Iain M. Banks

38. "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

39. "This isn't Ospin! These aren't the Dataversities!" ~ Iain M. Banks

40. "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

41. "Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain." ~ Iain M. Banks

42. "Now, quite apart from the fact that, from the point of view of the Earther, socialism suffers the devastating liability of only exhibiting internal contradictions when you are trying to use it as an adjunct to your own stupidity (unlike capitalism, which again, from the point of view of the Earther, happily has them built in from the start), it is the case that because Free Enterprise got there first and set up the house rules, it will always stay at least one kick ahead of its rivals." ~ Iain M. Banks

43. "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

44. "One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve." ~ Iain M. Banks

45. "I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought "ha, if I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, why me God? What have I done to deserve this?" and I thought at least I'm free of that, at least I can simply treat it as bad luck and get on with it." ~ Iain M. Banks

46. "It could always all be unreal - how could you ever tell otherwise? You took it on trust, in part because what would be the point of doing anything else? When the fake behaved exactly like the real, why treat it as anything different? You gave it the benefit of the doubt, until something proved otherwise." ~ Iain M. Banks

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There is no difference between saving lives and extending lives, because in both cases we are giving people the chance of more life."
Author: Aubrey De Grey

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