Iain Banks Quotes

I think I know the real reason."
"Which is?"
"Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?" He knocked the glass on the table. "Loads of stuff, but much of it alcohol." He drank from the glass. "Humanoids are the galaxy's way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol.

Faith is the eye that sees nothing and rejoices in it.

Very quick deaths, even given that they would have been wired in and speeded up, if I may just leap in front of any nascent and entirely vicarious moral qualms you may be about to suffer from, tiny human. Military personnel, babe; put themselves in harm’s way when they signed up. Just that the poor fuckers didn’t know it was my harm they were putting themselves in the way of. That’s war, doll; fairness comes excluded.

Which was more likely: what appeared to be the case, or this all being a lie, a set-up, a vast and incomprehensible joke? Discuss.

Perhaps my certainty is misplaced.

Muddle, confusion, stupidity, insane waste, pointless pain, misery and mass death—all the usual stuff of war, affecting him as it might affect anybody else, without any necessary moral reason, without any justice and even without any vindictiveness, just through the ghastly, banal working out of physics, chemistry, biochemistry, orbital mechanics and the shared nature of sentient beings existing and contending.

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.

She supposed she ought to feel impressed that Genar-Hofoen was sticking to his principles in the face of imminent death—and she did feel a little admiration—but mostly she just thought he was being stupid.

The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the gray-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass?
Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle.

But then, as she knew too well, the more fondly we imagine something will last forever, the more ephemeral it often proves to be.

Probably end up as one of those sordid cult leaders," Zefla said after a while as they plodded into a bare area of the forest where a fire had left thousands of tree trunks standing upright and bare, black posts already surrounded by slender young trees forcing their way towards the sky around them. "You know, pedalling some weird concoction of re-tread gibberish and living in a palace while their followers sleep shifts and work the streets and give you this big flatline smile when you tell them where to stuff their tracts.

There was some thing almost sublimely elegant, Sal thought, about how perfect a waste of time, people, resources and hard work the whole project had been.

I have lived ten thousand years; I am used to it. Lovers dying, civilisations dying…one develops a certain god-like indifference to it all, intellectually.

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

Such a stupid act. Sometimes heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination, the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn’t win medals but wars.