Iain Banks: Likeness

Iain Banks was Scottish writer. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Iain Banks: 278   quotes 2   likes

“Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 2 “The Hand of God 137” (p. 27).

Stupidity , Thinking

“I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.”

Iain Banks book Use of Weapons

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter II (p. 417).
Context: He shrugged. “Whatever.”
“Aw, Darac, come on; argue, dammit.”
“I don’t believe in argument,” he said, looking out into the darkness (and saw a towering ship, a capital ship, ringed with its layers and levels of armament and armor, dark against the dusk light, but not dead).
“You don’t?” Erens said, genuinely surprised. “Shit, and I thought I was the cynical one.”
“It’s not cynicism,” he said flatly. “I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.”
“Oh well, thank you.”
“It’s comforting, I suppose.” He watched the stars wheel, like absurdly slow shells seen at night: rising, peaking, falling...(And reminded himself that the stars too would explode, perhaps, one day.) “Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed,” he said. “And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses.”
“Excuses, eh? Well, if this ain’t cynicism, what is?” Erens snorted.
“Yes, excuses,” he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. “I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you’re supposed to argue about, come later. They’re the least important part of the belief. That’s why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place.” He looked at Erens. “You’ve attacked the wrong thing.”

People , Thinking

“That’s the trouble with people like them, I suppose; whenever you think you’re detecting the first signs of them starting to behave responsibly, it’s just them being even more devious and underhand than usual.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 8 “Killing Time” section V (p. 261).

People , Thinking

“The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the gray-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass?
Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Two (pp. 50-51).

Men , Flowers , Grass , Water

““You like music, Mr. Gurgeh?” Hamin asked, leaning over to the man.
Gurgeh nodded. “Well, a little does no harm.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 2 (p. 277).

Music

“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).

Death , Men , People , Peace

“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).

Truth , Sense

“Even the pain of what had felt on occasion like an irretrievably broken heart had consistently proved less lasting than she’d initially imagined and expected; the revelation that a boy’s taste was so grotesquely deficient he could prefer somebody else to her always reduced both the intensity and the duration of the anguish her heart demanded be endured to mark such a loss of regard.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 6 “Pittance” section III (p. 180).

Pain , Imagination , Boy , Loss

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

““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)

“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)

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