# Quote — Iain M. Banks, Excession

> Death, he remembered somebody saying once, was a kind of victory. To have lived a long good life, a life of prodigious pleasure and minimal misery, and then to die; that was to have won. To attempt to hang on forever risked ending up in some as-yet-unglimpsed horror future. What if you lived forever and all that had gone before, however terrible things had sometimes appeared to be in the past, however badly people had behaved to each other throughout history, was nothing compared to what was yet to come? Suppose in the great book of days that told the story of everything, all the gone, done past was merely a bright, happy introduction compared to the main body of the work, an unending tale of unbearable pain scraped in blood on a parchment of living skin?
>
> Better to die than risk that.
>
> Live well and then die, so that the you that is you now can never be again, and only tricks can re-create something that might think it is you, but is not.

- Author: [Iain M. Banks](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks.md)
- Book: [Excession](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/excession.md)
- Page: 259
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Iain_Banks#Excession_(1996)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/excession/death-he-remembered

## More from this book

> Even the pain of what had felt on occasion like an irretrievably broken heart had consistently proved less lasting than she’d initially imagined and expected; the revelation that a boy’s taste was so grotesquely deficient he could prefer somebody else to her always reduced both the intensity and the duration of the anguish her heart demanded be endured to mark such a loss of regard.

p. 180 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/excession/even-the-pain.md)

> He was tall and very dark-skinned and he had fabulously blond hair and a voice that could raise bumps on your skin at a hundred meters, or, better still, millimeters.

p. 151 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/excession/he-was-tall.md)

> I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.

p. 269 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/excession/i-am-as-i-have.md)