113 Quotes by Iain M. Banks

There's something very... I don't know; primitive, perhaps, about you, Gurgeh. You've never changed sex, have you?' He shook his head. 'Or slept with a man?' Another shake. 'I thought so,' Yay said. 'You're strange, Gurgeh.' She drained her glass.

the ignobility of thought and action that desperation born of indigence produces.

Empire had a clutch of missiles which were generally reckoned to be inoperable, and probably were politically unusable anyway because they were supposed to be nuclear-tipped. Public opinion in the Cluster could tolerate the technologically enhanced continuation of a pointless war so long as men, women and children died in relatively small, regular batches, but the thought of a million or so being incinerated at once, nuked in a city, was not to be tolerated.

So basically you're sticking around to watch us all fuck up ?""Yes. It's one of life's few guaranteed constants.

He might come in useful.''Yeah. So's a broken leg if you want to kick yourself in the back of the head.

As a matter of fact I did flirt with Socialism, in my youth.""That when you were in university, was it?"He smiled. "Yes. University. But then I saw how much more comfortable life could be as one of the exploiters rather than one of the exploited. Plus I decided that if the proles were so stupid as to let themselves be exploited, who was I to stand in their way?

You're saying nothing lasts forever, he heard the fellow whine. (Well, pretty trite, he thought.)No, he heard her say. I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and amongst those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.She went on talking after this, but he homed in on that. That was better, he thought. I liked that.

Somehow, later, exhausted and dismayed by these sapping, abrasive, attriting episodes, they came to a sort of truce; but it was at the expense of any closeness.

Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess.