IAIN M. BANKS QUOTES II

Scottish author (1954-2013)

Welcome to the future.... All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness.

IAIN M. BANKS

Matter


On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take years and generations to manifest themselves.

IAIN M. BANKS

The State of the Art

Tags: death


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 cell in your body from light-years off, but he wasn't able to go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision.

IAIN M. BANKS

The Player of Games

Tags: regret


It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky.

IAIN M. BANKS

The State of the Art

Tags: light


The swirling mist lay in the bottom of such great bowls like a broth of dreams.

IAIN M. BANKS

Consider Phlebas

Tags: dreams


He had to treat him as the maniac he obviously was. The fact that his insanity was dressed in religious trappings meant nothing.

IAIN M. BANKS

Consider Phlebas

Tags: insanity


Hell was always for other people.

IAIN M. BANKS

Surface Detail

Tags: Hell


Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.

IAIN M. BANKS

Consider Phlebas

Tags: money


It was like living half your life in a tiny, stuffy, warm gray box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better ... and then discovering a little hole in one corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get a finger into, and tease and pull at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you ... so that you stepped out of the tiny box's confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh air and found yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests, soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snowfields and a stunning, breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn't even the start of the real story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the first syllable of the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the first volume of the story.

IAIN M. BANKS

Excession

Tags: discovery


We created something a little closer to perfection than ourselves; maybe that’s the only way to progress. Let them try to do the same.

IAIN M. BANKS

The State of the Art

Tags: perfection


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 able to accept that you're just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] ... really, it's not about you.

IAIN M. BANKS

"Iain Banks: The Final Interview,", The Guardian, June 14, 2013

Tags: humanity


A guilty system recognizes no innocents.

IAIN M. BANKS

The Player of Games

Tags: guilt


Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess.

IAIN M. BANKS

The State of the Art

Tags: civilization


Here, in the bare dark face of night
A calm unhurried eye draws sight
--We see in what we think we fear
The cloudings of our thought made clear.

IAIN M. BANKS

Excession

Tags: night


Money is a sign of poverty.

IAIN M. BANKS

The State of the Art

Tags: poverty


I shall not be disappointed to leave all you bastards behind.

IAIN BANKS

The Quarry

Tags: disappointment


While the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once.

IAIN M. BANKS

The State of the Art

Tags: time


Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.

IAIN M. BANKS

Inversions

Tags: truth


It was a truism that all civilizations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.

IAIN M. BANKS

The Algebraist

Tags: civilization


Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed, and I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses.

IAIN M. BANKS

Use of Weapons

Tags: opinion