“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.” — 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
