“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
Iain M. Banks
Born place: in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland
Born date February 16, 1954
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“How are you, Rory?' [the Doctor] asked.
I [Rory]... answered him. 'It's been odd being you.'
'Isn't it?' The Doctor's smile didn't quite reach his eyes.
'How do you cope?'
'Ah...' The Doctor picked away at a scrap of loose paint on the door. 'Well, I just get as close as I can to a happy ending, then I shut the door behind me and move on.'
I nodded.
We shut the door behind us and moved on.”
― James Goss, quote from Doctor Who: Dead of Winter
“Can we just get it out there right now that I don’t want anything with you or from you?” I’m not going to lie; it felt like she’d punched me. But I still nodded. “I’m not looking for, or interested in, a relationship. It’s nothing against you. I just—I can’t—I don’t. Um, I—” “Rachel.” I waited until she looked up at me and again found myself wishing I could figure out what she was hiding from me. Did she have a boyfriend? Just get out of a bad relationship? “It’s fine. Nothing between us, I got it.” With a quick breath in, she nodded her head and forced a smile. “We kind of got off on the wrong foot, but since we’re going to be neighbors I’d like it if we were friends. I’m sorry for how I was toward you when I met you, and I’m sorry for the confusion this morning—can we just start over?” Only being friends with her sounded about as fun as kicking puppies right now. But this was good; I didn’t have time for a distraction and Rachel would definitely be a distraction . . . I don’t know why I even try lying to myself. The real problem was I couldn’t put Rachel in my world. I couldn’t put her in this danger, and being with her would put her right in the middle of it. So friends it was, then. “Sure,” I said softly, and watched a genuine smile cross her face. She stuck out her hand. “I’m Rachel Masters, from far West Texas.” God, she was cute. I grabbed her hand and tried to ignore the warmth coming from her body and how I wanted to lean into her, press my mouth to her neck, and breathe in the sweet scent coming from her. “Logan . . . Hendricks, from far East Texas. But you can call me Kash. It’s good to meet you, Rachel.” “You too, Kash with a K.”
― Molly McAdams, quote from Forgiving Lies
“Sometimes what seems like surrender isn't surrender at all. It's about what's going on in our hearts. About seeing clearly the way life is and accepting it and being true to it, whatever the pain, because the pain of not being true to it is far, far greater.' Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer.”
― Nikki Sex, quote from Bound and Freed Boxed Set
“An assassin with serial killer tendencies.”
― Francette Phal, quote from Flawed
“Someone's attention shouldn't have a physical weight, but it does. Hate's a heavy burden; hope is worse.”
― Josin L. McQuein, quote from Arclight
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