Iain M. Banks

Quotes

1. “It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders.”

   “Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civilisationally.”

   p. 312

2. 

   “One does not spy on one’s own people,” ZeSpiole informed him. “One has, rather, conduits of communication which lead to the common man.”

   p. 295

3. 

   But there we are. Some things never do make perfect sense. There must be some explanation, and it is perhaps a little like the Doctrine of the Perfect Partner. We must be content to know that she exists, somewhere in the world, and try not to care overmuch that we will probably never meet her.

   p. 132

4. 

   “Some of us prefer history to legends, lady,” DeWar said heavily, “and sometimes everybody can be wrong.”

   p. 37

5. 

   ~ Want to know one ugly thought?

   ~ Are there not enough in the world already?

   ~ Assuredly. But sometimes ugly thoughts can be prevented from becoming ugly deeds by exposing them.

   ~ If you say so.

   ~ One should always ask who has most to gain.

   p. 382

6. 

   “But even if all the other stuff seems a bit esoteric, just think of all those other avatars at all those other gatherings, concerts, dances, ceremonies, parties and meals; think of all that talk, all those ideas, all that sparkle and wit!”

   “Think of all that bullshit, the nonsense and non-sequiturs, the self-aggrandisement and self-deception, the boring stupid nonsense, the pathetic attempts to impress or ingratiate, the slow-wittedness, the incomprehension and the incomprehensible, the gland-addled meanderings and general suffocating dullness.”

   p. 245

7. 

   I am told he is something of a scholar, which is no bad thing in a king, providing it is not taken to excess.

   p. 402

8. 

   “See if you can hold off this pack of blood-sucking scavengers. Here’s my duelling sword.” The King handed me his own sword! “You have full permission to use it on anyone who looks remotely like a physician.”

   p. 47

9. 

   You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing.

   p. 69

10. 

    “The point is: what happens in heaven?”

    “Unknowable wonderfulness?”

    “Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn’t represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.”

    “Have you always thought that?”

    If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual’s circumstances—and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse—then you don’t have life after death; you just have death.”

    “There are those who believe that after death the soul is recreated into another being.”

    “That is conservative and a little stupid, certainly, but not actually idiotic.”

    “And there are those who believe that, upon death, the soul is allowed to create its own universe.”

    “Monomaniacal and laughable as well as provably wrong.”

    “There there are those who believe that the soul—”

    “Well, there are all sorts of different beliefs. However, the ones that interest me are those concerning the idea of heaven. That’s the idiocy it annoys me that others cannot see.”

    p. 229

11. 

    Did the Doctor really imagine that everbody went around believing different things? One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.

    p. 125

12. 

    Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves.

    p. 127