The sheer wastefulness of it all distressed him. He was older and wiser now and more used to the way that things really worked being more important t… - Iain Banks

The majority of species, too, could scrape together some sort of metaphysical framework, a form of earlier speculation – semi-deranged or otherwise – regarding the way things worked at a fundamental level which could later be held up as a philosophy, life-rule system or genuine religion, especially if one used the excuse that it was really only a metaphor, no matter how literally true it had declared itself to be originally.

It’s very nearly 1989 but it’s midnight in the Dark Ages just the thickness of a book away, the thickness of a skull away; just the turn of a page away.

Here, in the bare dark face of night
A calm unhurried eye draws sight —We see in what we think we fear
The cloudings of our thought made clear