Iain M. Banks

Quotes

1. Is there anything I can do? Just tell me.

   What can you do?

   Destroy things. All I can do is destroy things. It’s the only thing I’m any good at. Would you like me to destroy something?

   I want you to destroy everything! she screamed. Every fucking thing. All the evil men and compliant women, all the armies and companies and cults and faiths and orders and every stupid fucker in them! All of them! EVERYTHING!

   p. 427

2. 

   The King liked happy endings. You couldn’t blame the ancients for coming up with unhappy conclusions so often—they each spent all their single short life waiting either for oblivion or some absurd after-death torture—but that didn’t mean you had to stick faithfully to their paralyzed paradigms and ruin a good story with a depressing dénouement.

   p. 102

3. 

   Not wide asleep; fast awake!

   p. 55

4. 

   “What happens happens,” continued the Resiler, “and cannot be made to unhappen. We are the equations; we cannot deny the algebra of the universe or the result it brings us. Die peacefully or in hysterics, with grace or with despair; it matters not. Prepare or ignore; it matters not. Very little matters very much and almost nothing matters greatly.”

   p. 132

5. 

   “I think,” she said carefully, “that perhaps too many people want things to be simple when they are not and cannot be. Encouraging that desire is seductive and rewarding, but also dangerous.”

   p. 299

6. 

   They had faith and so would do things that were plainly not in their own immediate (or, often, long-term) best interests, because they just believed what they had been told.

   p. 223

7. 

   “Mr Taak,” he said, sitting back, sounding patient. “I’ve inspected your profile. You are not stupid. Misguided, idealistic, naive, certainly, but not stupid. You must know how societies work. You must at least have an inkling. They work on force, power and coercion. People don’t behave themselves because they are nice. That’s the liberal fallacy. People behave themselves because if they don’t they will be punished. All this is known. It isn’t even debatable. Civilisation after civilisation, society after society, species after species, all show the same pattern. Society is control: control is reward and punishment. Reward is being allowed to partake of the fruits of that society and, as a general but not unbreakable rule, not being punished without cause.”

   p. 144

8. 

   In the old days he had once wondered how many of the Cessorian high command, his old bosses, really believed in the Truth. He strongly suspected that the higher you went, the greater grew the proportion of those who didn’t really believe at all. They were in it for the power, the glory, the control and the glamour.

   p. 223

9. 

   Ah, dear. How fine the line is between acceptably defiant bravado and hopelessly delusional boasting.

   p. 361

10. 

    ~My full name is the Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath. Cool, eh?

    p. 502

11. 

    “Have you always been so suspicious, Banstegeyn?”

    He looked at her, unsmiling. “No, I stumbled into a position of great power quite by accident.”

    p. 443

12. 

    “No, Geis, it doesn’t wear off. Like certain exotic diseases, and unlike love, synchroneurobonding is for life.”

    Geis lowered his eyes. “You weren’t always so cynical about love.”

    “As they say; ignorance pays.”

    p. 15