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They speak very well of you". - "They speak very well of everybody." - "That so bad?" - "Yes. It means you can't trust them.
Iain Banks
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That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off... and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.
Iain Banks
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What they had talked themselves into, they could be silent out of.
Iain Banks
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Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.
Iain Banks
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-"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.
Iain Banks
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He wanted to be who he was, not the person he would become if he lost the one trait that distinguished him from everybody else, no matter how perverse that decision seemed to others.
Iain Banks
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Such a stupid act. Sometimes heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination, the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn't win medals but wars.
Iain Banks
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Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!
Iain Banks
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I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.
Iain Banks
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Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
Iain Banks
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Well, he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. Here we are again.
Iain Banks
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He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones.
Iain Banks
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She supposed she ought to feel impressed that Genar-Hofoen was sticking to his principles in the face of imminent death—and she did feel a little admiration—but mostly she just thought he was being stupid.
Iain Banks
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One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve.
Iain Banks
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
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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