Iain M. Banks

Quotes

1. Holse had no idea how these things worked; he had never really bothered with religion, though he had always paid lip-service to the church for the sake of an easy life. He had long suspected that the WorldGod was just another convenient semi-fiction supporting the whole structure that sustained the rich and powerful in their privilege.

   p. 101

2. 

   But are we within likelihood? Batra asked. Are we even still within the realm of anything other than paranoid lunacy?

   p. 357

3. 

   The majority of species, too, could scrape together some sort of metaphysical framework, a form of earlier speculation – semi-deranged or otherwise – regarding the way things worked at a fundamental level which could later be held up as a philosophy, life-rule system or genuine religion, especially if one used the excuse that it was really only a metaphor, no matter how literally true it had declared itself to be originally.

   p. 122

4. 

   We’ve filled the known universe with credulous idiots and we think we’ve sneakily contributed to our own safety by making it hard for anything untoward to creep in under our sensor coverage whereas in fact we’ve just made sure we harvest zillions of false positives and probably made the really serious shit harder to spot when it does eventually come flying.

   p. 357

5. 

   I do what I can to make this war as humane in its inhumanity as I can, and in any case, I always know that however bad it may be, its sheer unnecessary awfulness at least helps guarantee that we are profoundly not in some designed and overseen universe and so have escaped the demeaning and demoralising fate of existing solely within some simulation.

   p. 345

6. 

   He might have been blushing. “I’m sorry. You live there. I don’t need to tell you how fabulous they are.”

   “Well, for me it is—was—just home. When one grows up in a place, no matter how exotic it may seem to others, it is still where all the usual banalities and indignities of childhood occurred. Home is always the norm. It is everywhere else that is marvellous.”

   p. 369

7. 

   Utility is seven-eighths Proximity.

   p. 214

8. 

   Really we’re no better—you’re no better—than the savages. They always find excuses to justify their crimes, too. The point is not to commit them in the first place.

   p. 292

9. 

   Lededje formed the uncomfortable impression that the other woman was trying hard to be reassuring. This had never proved to be a good sign in Lededje’s past and she seriously doubted the pattern was about to change now.

   p. 66

10. 

    A good death. Well, he thought, given that you had to die, why want a bad one?

    p. 551

11. 

    Naturally, also, both sides were convinced they had right on their side, not that either was remotely naive enough to think that that had any possible bearing on the outcome whatsoever.

    p. 134

12. 

    “Fate, I tell you, if not the hand of the WorldGod itself…or whatever manipulatory appendage WorldGods possess. Anyway, the hand, metaphorically, of the WorldGod. Possibly.”

    “I think you underguess the workings of blind chance, sir.”

    p. 132