Iain Banks

"Lededje formed the uncomfortable impression that the other woman was trying hard to be reassuring. This had never proved to be a good sign in Lededje’s past and she seriously doubted the pattern was about to change now."

"Almost every developing species had a creation myth buried somewhere in its past, even if by the time they’d become space-faring it was no more than a quaint and dusty irrelevance (though, granted, some were downright embarrassing). Talking utter drivel about thunderclouds having sex with the sun, lonely old sadists inventing something to amuse themselves with, a big fish spawning the stars, planets, moons and your own ever-so-special People – or whatever other nonsense had wandered into the most likely feverish mind of the enthusiast who had come up with the idea in the first place – at least showed you were interested in trying to provide an explanation for the world around you, and so was generally held to be a promising first step towards coming up with the belief system that provably worked and genuinely did produce miracles: reason, science and technology."

"The majority of species, too, could scrape together some sort of metaphysical framework, a form of earlier speculation – semi-deranged or otherwise – regarding the way things worked at a fundamental level which could later be held up as a philosophy, life-rule system or genuine religion, especially if one used the excuse that it was really only a metaphor, no matter how literally true it had declared itself to be originally."

"Most species capable of forming an opinion on the subject had a pretty high opinion of themselves, and most individuals in such species tended to think it was a matter of some considerable importance whether they personally survived or not. Faced with the inevitable struggles and iniquities attendant upon a primitive life, it could be argued that it was an either very gloomy, unimaginative, breathtakingly stoic or just plain dim species that didn’t come up with the idea that what could feel like an appallingly short, brutal and terrifying life was somehow not all there was to existence, and that a better one awaited them, personally and collectively – allowing for certain eligibility requirements – after death."

"Naturally, also, both sides were convinced they had right on their side, not that either was remotely naive enough to think that that had any possible bearing on the outcome whatsoever."

"“There are no guarantees in war,” Green said. “Oh, there are,” blue said quietly, looking away into the darkness. “It’s just that they guarantee death, destruction, suffering, heartache and remorse.”"

"Utility is seven-eighths Proximity."

"I hope I did not alarm you unduly with my little display last night. I get into character sometimes, find it hard to know when I’m causing distress. My apologies, if any are required. If not, then please accept them in any event, on account, to be banked against any future transgression."

"He was not what he appeared to be. He was beginning to wonder if he had ever been. The ice inside the water planet did not exist; neither did the water planet itself, nor the star it orbited nor the galaxy beyond nor anything of what appeared to be real no matter how far out you might think you were looking. Nor how far in you looked, either. Peer into anything closely enough and you would find only the same graininess that the Real exhibited; the smallest units of measurement were the same in both realms, whether it was of time or extent or mass. For some people, of course, this meant the Real itself was not really real, not in the sense of being genuinely the last un-simulated bedrock of actuality. According to this view everybody was already in a pre-existing simulation but simply unaware of it, and the faithful, accurate virtual worlds they were so proud of creating were just simulations within a simulation. That way though, arguably, madness lay. Or a kind of lassitude through acceptance that could be exploited. There were few better ways of knocking the fight out of people than by convincing them that life was a joke, a contrivance under somebody else’s ultimate control, and nothing of what they thought or did really mattered."

"Some problems were generational; you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types. With luck."

"Filhyn smiled. “Is it not always better to tell the truth though, Representative?” Errun looked at her, shook his head. “The truth? No matter what? For good or ill? Are you mad? I do hope you’re having a joke with me here, young lady….Don’t pretend you are so naive, Filhyn. The truth is not always useful, not always good. It’s like putting your faith in water. Yes, we need the rain, but too much can sweep you away in a flood and drown you. Like all great natural, elemental forces, the truth needs to be channelled, managed, controlled and intelligently, morally allocated.” He glared at her. “You are having a joke with me, aren’t you?” I might as well be, she thought. She wondered if she would finally be a real politician when she agreed with what Errun was saying."

"And what was glory but something that reduced the more there were of you to share it?"

"I’m negotiating a tricky course between the minefield of personal honesty on one side and the rocky coast of operational security on the other."

"I’m just puzzled why I’m here. All I can think of is you still want to know something else. Or is this just the first circle of Hell? Do I stay here for ever being bored to death?"

"I beg to differ, as those who are right have always begged to differ from those who are wrong but refuse to admit it."

"“Chay, you must be quiet now, and prepare to meet your maker.” “I had no maker. My maker was the universe, or my parents.”"

"They looked happy as zealots who’d just found a heathen to burn, Veppers thought. That was a little worrying."

"“You’d make a great teenage boy,” she told the avatar. “I beg your pardon?” “You still think girls get moist when they hear arcane nomenclature. It’s sweet, I suppose.”"

"The avatar laughed, raised his eyebrows at her. “Golly. What shall we do, Lededje?” She thought. “The smartest thing?” she suggested."

"“I suppose I’d only be exposing my hopeless naivety if I asked if there was some alternative to this.” “It would be more of a hopeless inability to come to terms with reality,” the avatar told her."

"There now; cynical, paranoid and pessimistic. I think that completes the set, doesn’t it?"

"Backed up, tooled up, riled up. Time to waste something."

"Hell was always for other people."

"Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn’t stop his attention from wandering. The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their real worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detail. When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth."

"Your position is perverse, farcical and as intellectually demeaning as it is morally destitute."

"“I hear what you say,” Prin told him, keeping calm.… “It’s nonsense, of course, but it is interesting to know that you hold such views.”"

"To a gun, all problems resolved into what could be shot at."

"“Then what,” Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar’s obvious enthusiasm, “is making you smile about a disaster?” “Well, first, I didn’t cause it! Nothing to do with me; hands clean. Always a bonus."

"The meeting was a benign environment; potentially just as tremendously boring as war, but without the slivers of utter terror stuck in there as well."

"Very quick deaths, even given that they would have been wired in and speeded up, if I may just leap in front of any nascent and entirely vicarious moral qualms you may be about to suffer from, tiny human. Military personnel, babe; put themselves in harm’s way when they signed up. Just that the poor fuckers didn’t know it was my harm they were putting themselves in the way of. That’s war, doll; fairness comes excluded."

"Maybe it was immature to lust after revenge, but fuck that; let the fuckers die horribly. Well, let them die. She’d compromise that far. Evil wins when it makes you behave like it, and all that."

"I imagine my sorrow for your loss will prove containable."

"Don’t you think it’s hilarious when people think they’re being terribly clever? I know I do. Just as well some of us genuinely fucking are or we’d be in a hell of a fucking state."

"On the other hand it could have been worse. And arguably one way of making it worse would be to admit just how badly things had actually gone."

"That was the thing about traitors: they were people who’d already changed their minds at least once."

"“His opinion was: ‘as a challenge, without peer. As music, without merit.’”"

"Old equals sneaky."

"It rarely paid to frighten the masses, and it never paid to confuse them."

"Never underestimate the sheer selfishness and stupidity of people."

"Of course there were doubts about it, there always had been; when you found out about all the other holy books there had ever been throughout the histories of other peoples throughout the galaxy, you realised how common they were, and how fallible, how restricted they were by the usual tribal prejudices and traditions of the people who – it took real blind faith not to accept – had made them up."

"The reaction was…mixed. Some people…hated it…others…really hated it."

"He, Tik…hated clashing, atonal music. He was basically…taking the piss, showing how…easy it was to write…how difficult to…listen to."

"One should never mistake pattern…for meaning."

"All of which might make things a little difficult operationally ∞ Understood. Life is limitations. ∞ And glibness, patently, on occasion, too. Your pardon, but I sense motions being gone through. ∞ On occasion, a superfluity of assiduousness can be vulgar."

"The Real – with its vast volumes of nothing between the planets, stars, systems and galaxies – was basically mostly vacuum; an averaged near-nothing incapable of true complexity due to its inescapable impoverishment of structure and the sheer overwhelming majority of nothingness over substance."

"“I shall take that as meaning I am not being too hopelessly foolish.” “You may still be, but then so may I.” “Yes, well, let’s not make a competition out of it.”"

"We are largely the sum of all we’ve done, and to dispose of that knowledge would be to stop being one’s self."

"She hadn’t forgotten all her military training; one point she certainly recalled being taught was that anything that looked like an outrageous coincidence was probably enemy action."

"We really are taking this person’s existence as being a fact, not a myth? ∞ We are. It turns out that the myth which has been so carefully fostered is that his existence is mythical."

"Here’s some thing we don’t know but we can maybe find out, and it’s something that other people don’t want us to know. How much more seductive can you get?"