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Iain Banks Quotes
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Iain Banks was a Scottish author. He wrote mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, including the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies .

After the publication and success of The Wasp Factory , Banks began to write on a full-time basis. His first science fiction book, Consider Phlebas, was released in 1987, marking the start of the Culture series. His books have been adapted for theatre, radio and television. In 2008, The Times named Banks in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". In April 2013, Banks announced that he had inoperable cancer and was unlikely to live beyond a year. He died on 9 June 2013. Wikipedia  

✵ 16. February 1954 – 9. June 2013
Iain Banks photo
Iain Banks: 139   quotes 2   likes

Iain Banks Quotes

“"What, now?" "Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy."”

Iain Banks Culture series

Look to Windward page 213.
Culture series, Look to Windward (2000)

“He suspected the troops felt closer to somebody who spoke a different language but asked them questions than they did to somebody who shared their language and only ever used it to give orders.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Twelve (p. 394).

Question

“Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.”

Iain Banks book Transition

Transition ISBN 0-316-73107-2 p. 86.
Non-Culture Novels, Transition (2009)

Past

““I had formed the impression the Protector valued your counsel.”
“It is most valued when it most closely accords with his own view.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 8 (p. 140)

“It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting—corruption and favoritism, mostly—endemic to the system.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 1 (p. 91).

Happiness

“He looked up from it at the stars again, and the view was warped and distorted by something in his eyes, which at first he thought was rain.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 4 “The Passed Pawn” (p. 390).

Star

“I am told he is something of a scholar, which is no bad thing in a king, providing it is not taken to excess.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Epilogue (p. 402)
Culture series, Inversions (1998)

“We only become beasts—we become worse than beasts—when we torment others.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 11 (p. 197)

“Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place—and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all—so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 2 (p. 22)

People , Truth , Question , Learning

“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.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter VIII (p. 183).

War , Stupidity , Imagination , Decision

“How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 11 “Regarding Gravious” section X (p. 372).

Personality

“On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system, which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel, and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take years and generations to manifest themselves.”

Iain Banks

“State of the Art” (p. 136)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

Death , God , Food , Imagination

“There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means.”

Iain Banks

“Descendant” (p. 40)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

“And coincidence convinces the credulous. Two things happen at the same time, or one after another, and we assume there must be a link; well, we sacrificed a virgin last year, and there was a good harvest. Of course the ceremony to raise the sun works—it comes up every morning, doesn’t it? I say my prayers each night and the world hasn’t ended yet…
Dung beetle thinking. Life is too complicated for there not to be continual coincidences, and we just have to come to terms with the fact that they merely happen and aren’t ordained, that some things occur for no real reason whatsoever, and that this is not a punishment and that is not a reward. Good grief; the most copper-bottomed, platinum-card proof of divine intervention, of some holy masterplan, would be if there were no coincidences at all! That really would look suspicious.”

Iain Banks

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

Life , World , Thinking , Time

““I’m from out of town,” he said breezily. This was true. He’d never been within a hundred light-years of the place.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter IX (p. 147).

Light

“More than anything else now, though, he wanted to save Darckense. He had seen too many dead, dry eyes, too much air-blackened blood, too much fly-blown flesh, to be able to relate such ghastly truths to the nebulous ideas of honor and tradition that people claimed they were fighting for. Only the well-being of one loved person seemed really worth fighting for now; it was all that seemed real, all that could save his sanity.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter I (p. 444).

Love , People , Truth , Idea

“Pain, or even just discomfort, is like the warning sent by a frontier guard, sir. You are free to choose to ignore it, but you should not be unduly surprised if you are subsequently over-run by invaders.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 3 (p. 51)

Pain

“That was another thing she taught me. That you are what you do. To Providence—or Progress or the Future or before any other sort of judgment apart from our own conscience—what we have done, not what we have thought, is the result we are judged by.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Prologue (p. 3)
Culture series, Inversions (1998)

Future

“No! Get away from me, you wittering purple rogues! Away and become bankers the lot of you—admit what you really love!”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 3 (p. 45)

Love

“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”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 3 “Uninvited Guests” section IV (p. 104).

Fear , Thinking , Drawing , Night

“The war won’t end,” Aviger said. “It’ll just die away…I don’t think the Culture will give in like everybody thinks it will. I think they’ll keep fighting because they believe in it. The Idirans won’t give in, either; they’ll keep fighting to the last, and they and the Culture will just keep going at each other all the time, all over the galaxy eventually, and their weapons and bombs and rays and things will just keep getting better and better, and in the end the whole galaxy will become a battleground until they’ve blown up all the stars and planets and Orbitals and everything else big enough to stand on, and then they’ll destroy all of each other’s big ships and then the little ships, too, until everybody’ll be living in single units blowing each other up with weapons that could destroy a planet…and that’s how it’ll end; probably they’ll invent guns or drones that are even smaller, and there’ll only be a few smaller and smaller machines fighting over whatever’s left of the galaxy, and there’ll be nobody left to know how it all started in the first place.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 11 “The Command System: Stations” (pp. 380-381).

War , Star , Thinking , Time

“Death, he remembered somebody saying once, was a kind of victory. To have lived a long good life, a life of prodigious pleasure and minimal misery, and then to die; that was to have won. To attempt to hang on forever risked ending up in some as-yet-unglimpsed horror future. What if you lived forever and all that had gone before, however terrible things had sometimes appeared to be in the past, however badly people had behaved to each other throughout history, was nothing compared to what was yet to come? Suppose in the great book of days that told the story of everything, all the gone, done past was merely a bright, happy introduction compared to the main body of the work, an unending tale of unbearable pain scraped in blood on a parchment of living skin?
Better to die than risk that.
Live well and then die, so that the you that is you now can never be again, and only tricks can re-create something that might think it is you, but is not.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 8 “Killing Time” section V (pp. 259-260).

Life , Death , Pain , People

“Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side. We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Look to Windward
Culture series, Look to Windward (2000)

God , Sense , Memory , Animals

“I am not being obtuse.
You are being paranoid.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 5 “Kiss the Blade” section II (p. 136).

“The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 5 “Kiss the Blade” section I (p. 133).

Sun

“Destroying the whole universe' – an always tempting scenario when you realise in SF you can do anything – just seems too easy.”

Iain Banks

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/15/iain-banks-the-final-interview
Interviews

Universe

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

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 10 (p. 177)

People

“It was just like some ancient electricity-powered computer; it didn't matter how fast, error-free, and tireless it was, it didn't matter how great a labor-saving boon it was, it didn't matter what it could do or how many different ways it could amaze; if you pulled its plug out, or just hit the off button, all it became was a lump of matter; all its programs became just settings, dead instructions, and all its computations vanished as quickly as they'd moved.
It was, also, like the dependency of the human-basic brain on the human-basic body; no matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if your heart just gave out…
That was the Dependency Principle; that you could never forget where your off switches were located, even if it was somewhere tiresome.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 4 “Dependency Principle” section III (p. 122).

World , Way , Error , Intelligence

““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.”

Iain Banks Culture series

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

Smile , Thinking , Time , Help

“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.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 11 “Regarding Gravious” section VII (p. 369).

Death , Stupidity , Feeling

“I came out stunned. I was angry at them, then. Angry at them for surprising me, touching me like that. Of course I was angry at their stupidity, their manic barbarity, their unthinking, animal obedience, their appalling cruelty; everything that the memorial evoked… but what really hit me was that these people could create something that spoke so eloquently of their own ghastly actions; that they could fashion a work so humanly redolent of their own inhumanity.”

Iain Banks

“State of the Art” (p. 94)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

People , Stupidity , Fashion , Memory

“He would give up then, and console himself with something she’d said: that you could not love what you fully understood. Love, she maintained, was a process, not a state. Held still, it withered. He wasn’t too sure about all that; he seemed to have found a calm clear serenity in himself he hadn’t even known was there, thanks to her.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter IX (p. 149).

Love

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

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 7 (p. 127)

Wisdom , Age , Sport

““I believe in Providence, mistress.”
“But when you say Providence, do you really mean god?”
“No, mistress. I don’t believe in any of the old gods. No one does any more. No one of sense, at any rate. Providence is the rule of laws, mistress,” I said.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 7 (p. 126)

God , Law , Sense

“But there we are. Some things never do make perfect sense. There must be some explanation, and it is perhaps a little like the Doctrine of the Perfect Partner. We must be content to know that she exists, somewhere in the world, and try not to care overmuch that we will probably never meet her.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 7 (p. 132)

World , Sense , Perfection

“It was like living half your life in a tiny, stuffy, warm gray box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better…and then discovering a little hole in one corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get a finger into, and tease and pull at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you…so that you stepped out of the tiny box’s confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh air and found yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests, soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snowfields and a stunning, breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn’t even the start of the real story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the first syllable of the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the first volume of the story.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 4 “Dependency Principle” section III (p. 120).

Life , Books , Mountain , Tear

“The only sin is selfishness.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Prologue (p. 1; opening words)
Culture series, Inversions (1998)

Selfishness

“All the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar of dialectic of dissent which—simply stated—dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seem often to baffle the military and political mind.”

Iain Banks

“A Few Notes on the Culture” (pp. 168-169)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

Nature

““See if you can hold off this pack of blood-sucking scavengers. Here’s my duelling sword.” The King handed me his own sword! “You have full permission to use it on anyone who looks remotely like a physician.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 3 (p. 47)

“One can read too much into one’s own circumstances. I am reminded of one race who set themselves against us—oh, long ago now, before I was even thought of. Their conceit was that the galaxy belonged to them, and they justified this heresy by a blasphemous belief concerning design. They were aquatic, their brain and major organs housed in a large central pod from which several large arms or tentacles protruded. These tentacles were thick at the body, thin at the tips and lined with suckers. Their water god was supposed to have made the galaxy in their image.
“You see? They thought that because they bore a rough physical resemblance to the great lens that is the home of all of us—even taking the analogy as far as comparing their tentacle suckers to globular clusters—it therefore belonged to them. For all the idiocy of this heathen belief, they had prospered and were powerful: quite respectable adversaries, in fact.”
“Hmm,” Aviger said. Without looking up, he asked, “What were they called?”
“Hmm,” Xoxarle rumbled. “Their name…” The Idiran pondered. “…I believe they were called the…the Fanch.”

Iain Banks Culture series

“Never heard of them,” Aviger said.
“No, you wouldn’t have,” Xoxarle purred. “We annihilated them.”
Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 13 “The Command System: Terminus” (pp. 445-446).

God , Home , Water , Reading

“I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 8 “Killing Time” section VII (p. 269).

“Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I need never wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless and hateful thing to have to do.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Look to Windward (2000), Chapter 13 “Some Ways of Dying” (p. 317)

Hate

“Did you know that true subjective time is measured in the minimum duration of demonstrably separate thoughts?”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Look to Windward (2000), Chapter 13 “Some Ways of Dying” (p. 316)

Time

“But even if all the other stuff seems a bit esoteric, just think of all those other avatars at all those other gatherings, concerts, dances, ceremonies, parties and meals; think of all that talk, all those ideas, all that sparkle and wit!”

Iain Banks Culture series

“Think of all that bullshit, the nonsense and non-sequiturs, the self-aggrandisement and self-deception, the boring stupid nonsense, the pathetic attempts to impress or ingratiate, the slow-wittedness, the incomprehension and the incomprehensible, the gland-addled meanderings and general suffocating dullness.”
Source: Culture series, Look to Windward (2000), Chapter 11 “Absence of Gravitas” (p. 245)

Idea , Thinking , Dance

“Are you really as ignorant as you appear, Trelsen, or is this some sort of bizarre act, perhaps even meant to be amusing?”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Look to Windward (2000), Chapter 11 “Absence of Gravitas” (p. 231)

Appearance

“They spend time. That’s just it. They spend time traveling. The time weighs heavily on them because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives. They persist in hoping that something they think they’ll find in the place they’re heading for will somehow provide them with a fulfilment they feel certain they deserve and yet have never come close to experiencing.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Ziller frowned and tapped at his pipe bowl. “Some travel forever in hope and are serially disappointed. Others, slightly less self-deceiving, come to accept that the process of travelling itself offers, if not fulfilment, then relief from the feeling that they should be feeling fulfilled.”
Source: Culture series, Look to Windward (2000), Chapter 5 “A Very Attractive System” (p. 113)

Time , Hope , Thinking , Travel

“Is your own existence so replete with equanimity you find no outlet for worry except on behalf of others?”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Look to Windward (2000), Chapter 3 “Infra Dawn” (p. 67)

“The background to the war, my studious Homomdan pal, is three thousand years of ruthless oppression, cultural imperialism, economic exploitation, systematic torture, sexual tyranny and the cult of greed ingrained almost to the point of genetic inheritability.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Look to Windward (2000), Chapter 3 “Infra Dawn” (p. 66)

War

“We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they point the way to future triumphs. But the universe does not have our own best interests at heart, and to assume for a moment that it does, ever did or ever might is to make the most calamitous and hubristic of mistakes.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Look to Windward (2000), Chapter 2 “Winter Storm” (p. 36)

Success , Past , Future , Heart

“Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and wilfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Look to Windward (2000), Chapter 1 “The Light of Ancient Mistakes” (p. 25)

Lie , Appearance , Future