Iain M. Banks

Quotes

1. That was another thing she taught me. That you are what you do. To Providence—or Progress or the Future or before any other sort of judgment apart from our own conscience—what we have done, not what we have thought, is the result we are judged by.

   p. 3

2. 

   Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I need never wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless and hateful thing to have to do.

   p. 317

3. 

   No! Get away from me, you wittering purple rogues! Away and become bankers the lot of you—admit what you really love!

   p. 45

4. 

   Did you know that true subjective time is measured in the minimum duration of demonstrably separate thoughts?

   p. 316

5. 

   What I know was passed to me by others, and so must surrender the toll which information tends to pay when it passes through the minds and memories of others.

   p. 371

6. 

   “What, now?”

   “Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.”

   p. 176

7. 

   The background to the war, my studious Homomdan pal, is three thousand years of ruthless oppression, cultural imperialism, economic exploitation, systematic torture, sexual tyranny and the cult of greed ingrained almost to the point of genetic inheritability.

   p. 66

8. 

   We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they point the way to future triumphs. But the universe does not have our own best interests at heart, and to assume for a moment that it does, ever did or ever might is to make the most calamitous and hubristic of mistakes.

   p. 36

9. 

   “Quettil, it doesn’t matter,” the King said airily, waving one hand. “I prefer accuracy to flattery.”

   p. 158

10. 

    Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side.

    We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too.

    p. 316

11. 

    People often behave badly when they are trying to prove a point.

    p. 177

12. 

    When it was first revealed that each of our own deaths had to be balanced by that of an enemy—

    ~ It wasn’t revealed, Huyler. It was made up. It was a tale we told ourselves, not something the gods graced us with.

    p. 335