“But then, as she knew too well, the more fondly we imagine something will last forever, the more ephemeral it often proves to be.” — Iain M. Banks Copy Share Image
“It never ceased to amaze him how quickly a small child's face could turn from peach to beetroot.” — Iain M. Banks Copy Share
“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… — Iain M. Banks Copy Share
“[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… — Iain M. Banks Copy Share
“Some problems were generational; you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types.” — Iain M. Banks Copy Share
“I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being… — Iain M. Banks Copy Share
“We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they point the way to future success. But… — Iain M. Banks Copy Share
“just one more species, which would grow and expand and then, finding the plateau phase all non-suicidal species eventually arrived at, settle down.” — Iain M. Banks Copy Share
“Darkness came like a black flag waved over the canyon, drawing back the grayness from the shores of the city, then pushing forward the… — Iain M. Banks Copy Share
“Then the machine started to reel off infant-mortality rates and life-expectancy figures, sex ratios, types of diseases and their prevalence in the various strata… — Iain M. Banks Copy Share
“he saw that which cannot be seen; a concept; the adaptive, self-seeking urge to survive, to bend everything that can be reached to that… — Iain M. Banks Copy Share
“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… — Iain M. Banks Copy Share
“Tell me, what is happiness?” “Happiness? Happiness... is to wake up, on a bright spring morning, after an exhausting first night spent with a… — Iain M. Banks Copy Share
“Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed," he said. "And I think they know in their hearts that other people are… — Iain M. Banks Copy Share
“Once one survives the trough that comes with the understanding that people are going to go on being stupid and cruel to each other… — Iain M. Banks Copy Share
“God, what did any of it matter, in the end? You lived; you died. You were as indistinguishable from a distance as one of… — Iain M. Banks Copy Share
