“Once one survives the trough that comes with the understanding that people are going to go on being stupid and cruel to each other no matter what, probably for ever – if one survives; many people choose suicide at this… — Iain M. Banks Copy Share Image
“There is something about the very idea of a city which is central to the understanding of a planet like Earth, and particularly the understanding of that part of the then-existing group-civilization which called itself the West. That idea, to… — 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… — Iain M. Banks Copy Share Image
“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 Image
“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)
