The first time he saw somebody else he felt a mixture of emotions; fear, joy, expectation and a kind of disappointment that this wilderness was not h… - Iain Banks

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.

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

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