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4aa1f96
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Don't you think it's hilarious when people think they're being terribly clever? I know I do. Just as well some of us genuinely fucking are or we'd be in a hell of a fucking state.
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Iain M. Banks |
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dda4c70
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It was like flying upside-down over a planet made of metal; and of all the sights the galaxy held which were the result of conscious effort, it was one bested for what the Culture would call gawp value only by a big Ring, or a Sphere.
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Iain M. Banks |
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2fb151e
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Tell me, what is happiness?" "Happiness? Happiness... is to wake up, on a bright spring morning, after an exhausting first night spent with a beautiful... passionate... multi-murderess."
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Iain M. Banks |
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e75557f
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The drone told him one in ten of the people he passed on the street would be treated for mental illness at some point in their lives. The figure was higher for males than for apices, and higher for females than either. The same applied to the rates of suicide, which was illegal.
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Iain M. Banks |
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516dd6c
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experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.
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Iain M. Banks |
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2f2213a
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He gazed out to sea for a moment, then added, "One should never mistake pattern ... for meaning."
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Iain M. Banks |
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a0a9256
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Their history wasn't so far off the mean track, they were going through what a thousand other civilizations had gone through, and no doubt in the childhood of each of those there had been countless occasions when all any decent, well-balanced, reasonable and humanely concerned observer would have wanted to do was scream in despair.
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Iain M. Banks |
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38f0690
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Just before the Clear Air Turbulence went back into warp and its crew sat down at 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.
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Iain M. Banks |
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8eb0411
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We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they but 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.
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Iain M. Banks |
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71a39e0
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All these people seemed to do was talk! It supposed it was just what biologicals did. If you wanted to feel you were still somehow in control of a ship or a fleet or even your civilisation, talking amongst yourselves seemed to be the way you convinced yourself of it. Finally
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Iain M. Banks |
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77ccdf9
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I'm sure it varies across species - some seem to do quite well with no idea of love at all - but you soon enough come to realise that love generally comes from a need within ourselves, and that the behaviour, the ... expression of love is what is most important to us, not the identity, not the personality of the one who is loved.
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Iain M. Banks |
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09e16b0
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likes to think it is very protective of me." QiRia drank from his glass. "It is very protective of me. But certain sorts of protection, even care, can shade into a sort of desire for ownership. Certainly into a feeling that what is being protected is an earned exclusivity of access for the protector, not the privacy of the protected." He looked across at her. His eyes were the colour of the sea, she remembered. Dark now. "Do you understand?..
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Iain M. Banks |
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b86c07e
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He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.
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Iain M. Banks |
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71f8f76
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T]here can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered.
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wallowing
self-pity
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Iain M. Banks |
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996deac
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long sweeping swathes of darkly torrential rain.
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Iain M. Banks |
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6edb899
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Up to this point, the story of the Gzilt and their holy book was, to students of this sort of thing, quite familiar: an upstart part of a parvenu species/civ gets lucky, proclaims itself Special and waves around its own conveniently vague and multiply interpretable holy book to prove it. What set the Book of Truth apart from all the other holy books was that it made predictions that almost without exception came true, and anticipated phenom..
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Iain M. Banks |
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59c3be0
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Ancient, vicious, discredited ideas backed with adolescent war mania. It's
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Iain M. Banks |
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1c15730
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What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of
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Iain M. Banks |
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2929f3f
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just doing nothing is a statement, don't you understand that? What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn't lead to wisdom? And what's wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?
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Iain M. Banks |
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3797271
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He wasn't sure himself why he was pulling his punches in this way, but somehow it seemed important not to let Contact know everything, to keep something back. It was a small victory against them a little-game, a gesture on a lesser board; a blow against the elements and the gods.
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Iain M. Banks |
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ef81dc3
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We are such pathetic, fleshy things, so short lived, swarming and confused.
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Iain M. Banks |
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7819068
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It was the Culture's fault. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way which ensured they would not become enemies again.
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Iain M. Banks |
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520e159
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just one more species, which would grow and expand and then, finding the plateau phase all non-suicidal species eventually arrived at, settle down.
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Iain M. Banks |
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c45e2cc
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The smell was that of a sewer under an abattoir.
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Iain M. Banks |
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71784c2
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He was what she wanted, but it would mean so much more after a charged friendship; that long, exquisite exchange of gradually more intimate confidences, the slow accumulation of shared experiences, the languorous spiraling dance of attraction, coming and going and coming and going, winding closer and closer, until that laziness was sublimed in the engulfing heat of consummation. He
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Iain M. Banks |
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b18493d
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In the dying days of the Gzilt civilisation, before its long-prepared-for elevation to something better and the celebrations to mark this momentous but joyful occasion, one of its last surviving ships encountered an alien vessel whose sole task was to deliver a very special party-goer to the festivities.
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Iain M. Banks |
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c0fd63b
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It is very protective of me. But certain sorts of protection, even care, can shade into a sort of desire for ownership. Certainly into a feeling that what is being protected is an earned exclusivity of access for the protector, not the privacy of the protected.
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possessiveness
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Iain M. Banks |
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9d42f5c
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I]t was really only in the generation or two before hers that the idea had started to traverse the spectrum of likelihood in the popular imagination, beginning at unthinkable, progressing to absurd, then going from possible but unlikely to probable and likely, before eventually arriving - round about the time of her birth - at seemingly inevitable.
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normalization
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Iain M. Banks |
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669ec5b
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Hup! . . . and here we are, waking up. Quick scan around, nothing immediately threatening, it would seem . . . Hmm. Floating in space. Odd. Nobody else around. That's funny. View's a bit degraded. Oh-oh, that's a bad sign. Don't feel quite right, either. Stuff missing here . . . Clock running way slow, like it's down amongst the electronics crap . . . Run full system check. ... Oh, good grief!
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Iain M. Banks |
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ae83ffe
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There is always meaning. Or at least all things show a disturbing tendency to have meaning ascribed to them when intelligent creatures are present. It's just that there's no final Meaning, with a capital M. Though the illusion that there might be is comforting for a certain class of mind.
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Iain M. Banks |
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3fd0e81
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But no matter whether we are all in a still greater game, this one here before us is at a cruder grain than that which it models. Entire battles, and sometimes therefore wars, can hinge on a jammed gun, a failed battery, a single shell being dud or an individual soldier suddenly turning and running, or throwing himself on a grenade." Hyrlis shook his head. "That cannot be fully modelled, not reliably, not consistently. That you need to play..
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Iain M. Banks |
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a895822
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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.
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Iain M. Banks |
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bfd1739
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Well, in the end, there was no helping this. Sometimes you just had to adopt the attitude summed up by,
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Iain M. Banks |
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c9df7fa
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How about," Yay said, "magnetic fields under the base material and magnetized islands floating over oceans? No ordinary land at all; just great floating lumps of rock with streams and lakes and vegetation and a few intrepid people; doesn't that sound more exciting?"
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Iain M. Banks |
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acadb5d
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the battle-memes of the invading alien consciousness aided by the thought processes and shared knowledge of the by now obviously completely overwhelmed ship. With
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Iain M. Banks |
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99c939d
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Module," Za said, sprawling out over the seat and looking thoughtful, "I'd like a double standard measure of staol and chilled Shungusteriaung warp-wing liver wine bottoming a mouth of white Eflyre-Spin cruchen-spirit in a slush of medium cascalo, topped with roasted weirdberries and served in a number three strength Tipprawlic osmosis-bowl, or your best approximation thereof."
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Iain M. Banks |
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d1123fa
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Rules and laws exist only because we take pleasure in doing what they forbid, but as long as most of the people obey such proscriptions most of the time, they have done their job.
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Iain M. Banks |
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ccc9a6c
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I have a whole regimental intelligence service that's developed a fine line in rumour-mongering and story-placing over the last few years, and the ear of every media player you've courted so assiduously over the decades; they will ask the questions we've suggested, they will listen, and they will repeat what we tell them. The issue is whether people believe it.
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Iain M. Banks |
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0c5434b
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Others reckoned that as long as the termination was instant, with no warning and therefore no chance that those about to be switched off could suffer, then it didn't really matter. The wretches hadn't existed, they'd been brought into existence for a specific, contributory purpose, and now they were nothing again; so what? Most people, though, were uncomfortable with such moral brusqueness, and took their responsibilities in the matter more..
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Iain M. Banks |
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3e6a5b0
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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 ..
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Iain M. Banks |
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d4157d5
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That's what we've lost, you know. What you've lost; all of you. A sense of wonder and awe and . . . sin. These people know there are still things they don't know, things that can still go wrong, things they can still do wrong.
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Iain M. Banks |
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f2070ce
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It strikes me that although we occasionally carp about Having To Suffer, and moan about never producing real Art, and become despondent or try too hard to compensate, we are indulging in our usual trick of synthesizing something to worry about, and should really be thanking ourselves that we live the life we do. We may think ourselves parasites, complain about Mind-generated tales, and long for 'genuine' feelings, 'real' emotion, but we are..
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Iain M. Banks |
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6986322
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See that little black thing sticking up?" Gurgeh looked. There was a little black bulb poking up through the surface of the red mud. "Yes." "That's his dick." Gurgeh looked suspiciously at the other man. "How exactly is that going to help him?" "The Uhnyrchal can breathe through their dicks," Za said. "That guy's fine; he'll be fighting in another club tomorrow night; maybe even later this evening."
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Iain M. Banks |
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6c05f03
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Darkness came like a black flag waved over the canyon, drawing back the grayness from the shores of the city, then pushing forward the individual specks of street and building lights as though in recompense.
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Iain M. Banks |