Iain Banks: Trending quotes

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Iain Banks: 278 quotes2 likes

““I’m very sorry,” the drone said, without a trace of contrition.”

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 3 (p. 308).

“The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.”

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 3 “Uninvited Guests” section I (p. 66).

“He had to give orders that meant men died, and sometimes sacrifice hundreds, thousands of them, knowingly sending them to their near-certain deaths, just to secure some important position or goal, or protect some vital position. And always, whether they liked it or not, the civilians suffered too; the very people they both claimed to be fighting for made up perhaps the bulk of the casualties in their bloody struggle.
He had tried to stop it, tried to bargain, from the beginning, but neither side wanted peace on anything except its own terms, and he had no real political power, and so had had to fight.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter I (p. 443).

“He wanted to be who he was, not the person he would become if he lost the one trait that distinguished him from everybody else, no matter how perverse that decision seemed to others.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 4 “Dependency Principle” section V (p. 129).

“What they had talked themselves into, they could be silent out of.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter IX (p. 157).

“An excess of boringness does not make a thing interesting except in the driest academic sense. A place is not boring if you have to look really hard for something which is interesting. If there is absolutely nothing interesting about any particular place, then that is a perfectly interesting and quintessentially un-boring place.”

Iain Banks

“State of the Art” (p. 112)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

“There came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 5 “Kiss the Blade” section III (p. 149).

“Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 11 “Regarding Gravious” section VI (p. 365).

“Perhaps my certainty is misplaced.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Epilogue (p. 399)
Culture series, Inversions (1998)

“Tishlin’s dubious look indicated he wasn’t totally convinced this phrase contributed enormously to the information-carrying capacity of the language.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 2 “Not Invented Here” section II (p. 58).

“There is always the right of the strong to take the weak and the rich to take the poor and the powerful to take those who have no power. UrLeyn may have written down our laws and changed a few of them, but the laws that still bind us to the animals cut the deepest. Men compete for power, they strut and parade and they impress their fellows with their possessions and they take the women they can. None of that has changed. They may use weapons other than their hands and teeth, they may use other men and they may express their dominance in money, not other symbols of power and glamour, but…”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 20 (p. 335)

“Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.”

Iain Banks

Source: Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991) “State of the Art” (p. 128)

“Some of us prefer history to legends, lady,” DeWar said heavily, “and sometimes everybody can be wrong.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 2 (p. 37)

“That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off…and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 2 “The Hand of God 137” (p. 32).

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

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 4 (p. 69)

“If you have any helpful suggestions I’d be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 7 “Tier” section III (p. 219).

“Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 7 “Tier” section II (p. 212).

“We created something a little closer to perfection than ourselves; maybe that’s the only way to progress. Let them try to do the same. I doubt they can, so they will always be less as well as more than us. It’s all just a sum, a whispered piece of figuring lost in the empty blizzards of white noise howling through the universe, a brief oasis in an infinite desert, a freak bit of working out in which we have transcended ourselves, and they are only the remainder.”

Iain Banks

“Descendant” (pp. 47-48)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

““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.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter IX (p. 148).

“Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.”

Iain Banks

“Piece” (p. 75)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)