Iain M. Banks

Quotes

1. “I do believe my sarcasm-meter just twitched.”

   “A false positive, I fear. I was being entirely sincere.”

   p. 291

2. 

   “He might come in useful,” Cenuij said.

   “Yeah,” Zefla said. “So’s a broken leg if you want to kick yourself in the back of the head.”

   p. 202

3. 

   The truth is the truth. You tell it even when it hurts or it loses value even when it doesn’t.

   p. 505

4. 

   Promises take many shapes, and the more…momentous they are, the more they might look like threats. All great promises are threats, I suppose, to the way things have been until that point, to some aspect of our lives, and we all suddenly become conservative, even though we want and need what the promise holds, and look forward to the promised change at the same time.

   p. 388

5. 

   Geis is a pain, Sharrow; the guy has a kind of charming facade but basically he’s a social inadequate whose real place in life is out mugging pensioners and cheating and beating on his girlfriends, and if he had three more names and been raised in a rookery in the The Meg rather than the nursery at house Tzant, that’s exactly what he would be doing. Instead he jumps out of the commercial equivalent of dark allies, strips companies and fucks their employees. He’s got no idea how real people work so he plays the market instead; he’s a rich kid who thinks the banks and courts and Corps are his construction set and he doesn’t want anybody else to play. He wants you the way he wants a sexy company, as a bauble, a scalp, something to display. Never get beholden to people like that, they’ll piss on you and then charge irrigation fees.

   p. 52

6. 

   “I have buffed and polished my medals for decades of steady, dedicated watchfulness,” the marshal continued, clasping her hands behind her head as she leaned back and relaxed, legs crossed, “counted and re-counted my medals for outstanding work in simulations and exercises, carefully rearranged my medals for heroic bravery under virtual fire, and even found room for my many, many medals for exemplary valour in the face of fellow officers coveting the same promotions as I.”

   p. 443

7. 

   “How are you?”

   “I am here.”

   “Apart from that,” she said levelly.

   “There is no apart from that.”

   p. 38

8. 

   One should never regret one’s excesses, only one’s failures of nerve.

   p. 462

9. 

   “Anyway,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

   “Indeed. I can see contrition oozing from your every pore.”

   p. 59

10. 

    We all think we’re special, and in a way we are, but, at the same time, that feeling of being special is one of the things that’s common to us all, that unites us and makes us the same as each other. And when that feeling of…specialness is questioned, we feel threatened, naturally.

    p. 388

11. 

    The news channels are spasming, or frothing, or whatever it is they do.

    p. 394

12. 

    ‘Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.’