“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.”
Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 11 “The Command System: Stations” (pp. 380-381).
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Iain Banks 139
Scottish writer 1954–2013Related quotes

“It will get easier each time, I think. I hope. I just have to keep trying.”
Source: To All the Boys I've Loved Before
As quoted by David Milner, "Kenpachiro Satsuma Interview III" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/satsum3.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1995)

Interview on Entertainment Tonight, as quoted in "Oprah Winfrey Offers Words of Wisdom in Wake of Deadly Las Vegas Shooting", KTVB (2 October 2017)

Ian Smith, as quoted in Heidi Holland, Dinner with Mugabe, Penguin Books; Reprint edition (5 Feb 2009), ISBN 0143026186.

On his writing technique in “‘Mission’ Accomplished? Not Yet, but Closer: Theater: Lane Nishikawa, star of a one-man show about diversity, says mainstream representation of Asian Americans is better than it was.” https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-04-18-ca-55954-story.html in Los Angeles Times (1995 Apr 18)