History Quote by Iain M. Banks

“It never ceased to amaze him how quickly a small child's face could turn from peach to beetroot.”

— Iain M. Banks

“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

“[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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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