Iain Banks - Excession (1996)

18 Sourced Quotes

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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
Maybe it wasn't anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or metaphilosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just... accounting.

Iain Banks
The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them.

Iain Banks
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.

Iain Banks
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 Banks
There came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.

Iain Banks
The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.

Iain Banks
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.

Iain Banks
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
That's the trouble with people like them, I suppose; whenever you think you're detecting the first signs of them starting to behave responsibly, it's just them being even more devious and underhand than usual.

Iain Banks
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
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
Tishlin's dubious look indicated he wasn't totally convinced this phrase contributed enormously to the information-carrying capacity of the language.

Iain Banks
He was tall and very dark-skinned and he had fabulously blond hair and a voice that could raise bumps on your skin at a hundred meters, or, better still, millimeters.

Iain Banks
Even the pain of what had felt on occasion like an irretrievably broken heart had consistently proved less lasting than she'd initially imagined and expected; the revelation that a boy's taste was so grotesquely deficient he could prefer somebody else to her always reduced both the intensity and the duration of the anguish her heart demanded be endured to mark such a loss of regard.

Iain Banks
If you have any helpful suggestions I'd be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.

Iain Banks
Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.

Iain Banks
How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails.

Iain Banks