113 Quotes by Iain M. Banks

Just before the Clear Air Turbulence went back into warp and its crew sat down at the table, the ship expelled the limp corpse of Zallin. Where it had found a live man in a suit, it left a dead youth in shorts and a tattered shirt, tumbling and freezing while a thin shell of air molecules expanded around the body, like an image of departing life.

All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy. Nothing was ever identical to anything else because it didn't share the same special coordinates; nothing could be identical to anything else because you couldn't share the property of uniqueness.

Escape is a commodity like anything else.

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.

Some problems were generational; you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types.

From somewhere came the idea that there were many different levels of sleeping, of unconsciousness, and therefore of awakening. In the midst of this pleasant woozy calm - warm, pleasantly swaddled, self-huggingly curled up, a sort of ruddy darkness behind the eyelids - it was an easy and comforting thing to contemplate the many ways one might be away, and then come back.

Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying all this wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness.

It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky.

It could always all be unreal - how could you ever tell otherwise? You took it on trust, in part because what would be the point of doing anything else? When the fake behaved exactly like the real, why treat it as anything different? You gave it the benefit of the doubt, until something proved otherwise.