He lay, often, looking at her sleeping face in the new light that fell in through the open walls of the strange house, and he stared at her skin and … - Iain Banks

“Let’s waste a little time, hmm?”
“A nice euphemism, sir,” she mused distantly. He smiled. “Come and help me think of better ones.” She smiled and they both looked at each other. There was a long pause.

I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and among those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.

Can’t machines build these faster?” he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell.“Why, of course!” she laughed.“Then why do you do it?”“It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think, I helped build that. The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact that it was you who actually did it.”
“Hmm,” he said.
“Well, you may ‘hmm’ as you wish,” the woman said, approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship, where a few other construction workers were standing, pointing inside the model and talking. “But have you ever been gliding or swum underwater?”
“Yes,” he agreed.
The woman shrugged. “Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?”
He smiled. “I suppose not.”
“You suppose correctly,” the woman said. “And why?” She looked at him, grinning. “Because it’s fun.