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All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.
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All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.
Iain Banks
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I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.
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There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.
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If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!
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What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn't lead to wisdom? And what's wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?
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These people have successfully incorporated a belief in your martial prowess into their religion; how can you deny them?
Believe me, it would be easy.
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The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them.
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She took a deep breath. Suddenly, she felt quite entirely sober. Is this as important as I think it is?
Almost certainly much more so.
Oh, she said, fuck.
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One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them. We here are not children, Mr. Gurgeh. Hamin waved the pipestem round the tables of people. Rules and laws exist only because we take pleasure in doing what they forbid, but as long as most of the people obey such proscriptions most of the time, they have done their job; blind obedience would imply we are—ha! —Hamin chuckled and pointed at the drone with the pipe— no more than robots!
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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
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He had to give orders that meant men died, and sometimes sacrifice hundreds, thousands of them, knowingly sending them to their near-certain deaths, just to secure some important position or goal, or protect some vital position. And always, whether they liked it or not, the civilians suffered too; the very people they both claimed to be fighting for made up perhaps the bulk of the casualties in their bloody struggle.
He had tried to stop it, tried to bargain, from the beginning, but neither side wanted peace on anything except its own terms, and he had no real political power, and so had had to fight.
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Empires are synonymous with centralized—if occasionally schismatized—hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through—usually—a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society's information dissemination systems and its lesser—as a rule nominally independent—power systems. In short, it's all about dominance.
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Sorrow be damned and all your plans. Fuck the faithful, fuck the committed, the dedicated, the true believers; fuck all the sure and certain people prepared to maim and kill whoever got in their way; fuck every cause that ended in murder and a child screaming.
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There came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.
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The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.
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Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side. We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too.
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My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it,
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I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.
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He suspected the troops felt closer to somebody who spoke a different language but asked them questions than they did to somebody who shared their language and only ever used it to give orders.
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You like music, Mr. Gurgeh? Hamin asked, leaning over to the man.
Gurgeh nodded. Well, a little does no harm.
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Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would still know she was part of you.
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And I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity; I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.
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So it's false.
What isn't?
Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.
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"What, now?" "Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy."
Iain Banks
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Quote of the day
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Iain Banks
Creative Commons
Born:
February 16, 1954
Died:
June 9, 2013
(aged 59)
Bio:
Iain Banks was a Scottish author. He wrote mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, including the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies.
Known for:
Consider Phlebas (1987)
Use of Weapons (1990)
The Wasp Factory (1984)
The Player of Games (1988)
Excession (1996)
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