“Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Inversions
“One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Inversions
“As you say, DeWar, our shame comes from the comparison. We know we might be generous and compassionate and good, and could behave so, yet something else in our nature makes us otherwise." She smiled a small, empty smile. "Yes, I feel something I recognise as love. Something I remember, something I may discuss and mill and theorise over." She shook her head. "But it is not something I know. I am like a blind woman taking about how a tree must look, or a cloud. Love is something I have a dim memory of, the way someone who went blind in their early childhood might recall the sun, or the face of their mother. I know affection from my fellow whore-wives, DeWar, and I sense regard from you and feel some in return. I have a duty to the Protector, just as he feels he has a duty to me. As far as that goes, I am content. But love? That is for the living, and I am dead.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Inversions
“Patience can be a means of letting matters mature to a proper state for action, not just a way of letting time slip away.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Inversions
“Yet at the same time there is something about her deportment which I – and I suspect most other males – find off-putting, and even slightly threatening. A certain immodest forthrightness in her bearing is the cause of this, perhaps, plus the suspicion that while she pays flawless lip service to the facts of life which dictate the accepted and patent preeminence of the male, she does so with a sort of unwarranted humour, producing in us males the unsettlingly contrary feeling that she is indulging us.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Inversions
“Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Inversions
“[M]y determined and strenuous endeavours to take in absolutely nothing of what I had regarded as entirely the most irrelevant part of my schooling had patently not met with total success”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Inversions
“But there we are. Some things never do make perfect sense. There must be some explanation, and it is perhaps a little like the Doctrine of the Perfect Partner. We must be content to know that she exists, somewhere in the world, and try not to care overmuch that we will probably never meet her.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Inversions
Iain M. Banks
Born place: in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland
Born date February 16, 1954
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“The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from A Short History of Nearly Everything
“My dad's filthy rich, and even though we're Irish Catholic I'm an only child. I've got more money than you do so I'll work for free. No charge. A free law clerk for three weeks. I'll do all the research, typing, answering the phone. I'll even carry your briefcase and make the coffee.
I was afraid you'd want to be a a law partner.
No I'm a woman, and I'm in the South. I know my place.”
― John Grisham, quote from A Time to Kill
“One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held for him more then just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of Creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift, but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument that life did not just happen.”
― Charles Frazier, quote from Cold Mountain
“the ladies, young or old. There is no resisting a cockade,”
― Jane Austen, quote from The Complete Novels
“I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.”
― Jonathan Swift, quote from Gulliver's Travels
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Sun Stand Still: Wha...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.
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