Iain M. Banks

Quotes

1. “I suppose I’d only be exposing my hopeless naivety if I asked if there was some alternative to this.”

   “It would be more of a hopeless inability to come to terms with reality,” the avatar told her.

   p. 418

2. 

   To a gun, all problems resolved into what could be shot at.

   p. 450

3. 

   They looked happy as zealots who’d just found a heathen to burn, Veppers thought. That was a little worrying.

   p. 390

4. 

   I imagine my sorrow for your loss will prove containable.

   p. 584

5. 

   She hadn’t forgotten all her military training; one point she certainly recalled being taught was that anything that looked like an outrageous coincidence was probably enemy action.

   p. 177

6. 

   The Real – with its vast volumes of nothing between the planets, stars, systems and galaxies – was basically mostly vacuum; an averaged near-nothing incapable of true complexity due to its inescapable impoverishment of structure and the sheer overwhelming majority of nothingness over substance.

   p. 149

7. 

   Hell was always for other people.

   p. 435

8. 

   Maybe it was immature to lust after revenge, but fuck that; let the fuckers die horribly.

   Well, let them die.

   She’d compromise that far.

   Evil wins when it makes you behave like it, and all that.

   p. 518

9. 

   We really are taking this person’s existence as being a fact, not a myth?

   ∞

   We are. It turns out that the myth which has been so carefully fostered is that his existence is mythical.

   p. 200

10. 

    Don’t you think it’s hilarious when people think they’re being terribly clever? I know I do. Just as well some of us genuinely fucking are or we’d be in a hell of a fucking state.

    p. 594

11. 

    We are largely the sum of all we’ve done, and to dispose of that knowledge would be to stop being one’s self.

    p. 174

12. 

    “His opinion was: ‘as a challenge, without peer. As music, without merit.’”

    p. 33