“ Why had he done it? Why couldn't it just not have happened? Why didn't they have time-travel, why couldn't he go back and stop it happening? Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every… — Iain M. Banks Copy Share Image
“...for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not yet fully woken up, and events within its sleek hull… — 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 Image
“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 Image
“[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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 of society, average incomes, the incidence of unemployment, per capita income as a ratio of total population in given areas, birth-tax and death-tax and the penalties for abortion and illegitimate birth; it talked about laws governing… — 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 end, and to remove and to add and to smash and to create so that one particular collection of cells can go on, can move onwards and decide, and keeping moving, and keeping deciding, knowing 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 Image
“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 Image
![“[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…” quote by Iain M. Banks](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/e3b/iain-m-banks-3729_ideas_i-t-was-really-only-in-the-generation-or_47398.jpg)
