Iain M. Banks

Quotes

1. The reaction was…mixed. Some people…hated it…others…really hated it.

   p. 124

2. 

   On the other hand it could have been worse. And arguably one way of making it worse would be to admit just how badly things had actually gone.

   p. 622

3. 

   “So,” she said, “living all this time has been to no purpose, basically.”

   “True, but that hardly distinguishes me from anybody else, does it?”

   “But shouldn’t it, or there’s no point?”

   “No. Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean toward the latter. However, just having done more of it than another person doesn’t really make much difference.”

   p. 210

4. 

   The avatar laughed, raised his eyebrows at her. “Golly. What shall we do, Lededje?”

   She thought. “The smartest thing?” she suggested.

   p. 417

5. 

   Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn’t stop his attention from wandering. The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their real worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detail.

   When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.

   p. 440

6. 

   There now; cynical, paranoid and pessimistic. I think that completes the set, doesn’t it?

   p. 428

7. 

   The meeting was a benign environment; potentially just as tremendously boring as war, but without the slivers of utter terror stuck in there as well.

   p. 478

8. 

   All of which might make things a little difficult operationally

   ∞

   Understood. Life is limitations.

   ∞

   And glibness, patently, on occasion, too. Your pardon, but I sense motions being gone through.

   ∞

   On occasion, a superfluity of assiduousness can be vulgar.

   p. 145

9. 

   “You’d make a great teenage boy,” she told the avatar.

   “I beg your pardon?”

   “You still think girls get moist when they hear arcane nomenclature. It’s sweet, I suppose.”

   p. 410

10. 

    “I shall take that as meaning I am not being too hopelessly foolish.”

    “You may still be, but then so may I.”

    “Yes, well, let’s not make a competition out of it.”

    p. 151

11. 

    “Chay, you must be quiet now, and prepare to meet your maker.”

    “I had no maker. My maker was the universe, or my parents.”

    p. 369

12. 

    Of course there were doubts about it, there always had been; when you found out about all the other holy books there had ever been throughout the histories of other peoples throughout the galaxy, you realised how common they were, and how fallible, how restricted they were by the usual tribal prejudices and traditions of the people who – it took real blind faith not to accept – had made them up.

    p. 111