Quotes from Excession

“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 M. Banks, quote from Excession

“It was a warship, after all. It was built, designed to glory in destruction, when it was considered appropriate. It found, as it was rightly and properly supposed to, an awful beauty in both the weaponry of war and the violence and devastation which that weaponry was capable of inflicting, and yet it knew that attractiveness stemmed from a kind of insecurity, a sort of childishness. It could see that—by some criteria—a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgment implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of the weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“But then, as she knew too well, the more fondly we imagine something will last forever, the more ephemeral it often proves to be.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“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 M. Banks, quote from Excession

“there came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“Unbelievable. I’m in a fucking Outside Context situation, the ship thought, and suddenly felt as stupid and dumb-struck as any muddy savage confronted with explosives or electricity.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“A new collection of matter and information to present to the universe and to which it in turn will be presented; different, arguably equal parts of that great ever-repetitive, ever-changing jurisdiction of being.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“the Fate had moved, or had been moved, thirty light years in less than a picosecond.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“It also occurred to him that Minds wrote voluminous biographies of each other in order to cover the odd potentially valuable or embarrassing nugget of truth under a mountain of bullshit.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“and was taken to the Forward Docks and a big, brightly lit hangar, where the Psychopath Class ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views was waiting for her. Ulver laughed. 'It looks,' she snorted, 'like a dildo!' 'That's appropriate,' Churt Lyne said. 'Armed, it can fuck solar systems.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“the battle-memes of the invading alien consciousness aided by the thought processes and shared knowledge of the by now obviously completely overwhelmed ship. With”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“Hup! . . . and here we are, waking up. Quick scan around, nothing immediately threatening, it would seem . . . Hmm. Floating in space. Odd. Nobody else around. That’s funny. View’s a bit degraded. Oh-oh, that’s a bad sign. Don’t feel quite right, either. Stuff missing here . . . Clock running way slow, like it’s down amongst the electronics crap . . . Run full system check. ... Oh, good grief!”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“To touch this abomination with anything less perfectly attuned to its nature than the carefully dispersed wings of an engine field would be like an ancient, fragile rocket ship falling into a sun, like a wooden sea-ship encountering an atomic blast.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“Ulver Seich woke up in the best possible way.  She surfaced with a languorous slowness through fuzzy layers of luxurious half-dreams and memories of sweetness, sensuality and sheer carnal bliss… to find it all merging rather splendidly into reality, and what was happening right now.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“[B]ecause of all his previous attempts to integrate with the rest of society and what he had learned about himself through them - 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 M. Banks, quote from Excession

“the ignobility of thought and action that desperation born of indigence produces.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“[A]ll her hardships had been self-inflicted and recreational in the past.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“Somehow, later, exhausted and dismayed by these sapping, abrasive, attriting episodes, they came to a sort of truce; but it was at the expense of any closeness.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“He felt great. spa'dassins digladiate; ziffidae and xebecs contend! gol-iard dunking!”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“no matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if your heart just gave out . . . That”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

“Meanwhile the Mind of Pittance watched over them, and looked out into the resounding silence and the sun-freckled darkness of the spaces between the stars, forever content and ineffably satisfied with the absence of anything remotely interesting happening.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Excession

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“Listen to me. I did not wish to be summoned by your Princess. Summoned, I did not wish to come. But having been summoned, and having come, I mean to give a good account of myself. That’s how I was taught by my father, and the men of his age who slew Kings and swept away not merely Governments but whole Systems of Thought, like Khans of the Mind. I would have my son in Boston know of my doings, and be proud of them, and carry my ways forward to another generation on another continent. Any opponent who does not know this about me, stands at a grave disadvantage; a disadvantage I am not above profiting from.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from The System of the World

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About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2018, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.