“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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“Plus, he was bald as an egg. But I felt bad for him. It wasn’t his fault that his mom was the biggest bitch in Kansas—well, second biggest, now that I was back.”
― Danielle Paige, quote from Yellow Brick War
“First off, guys don’t say BFF.”
― B.N. Toler, quote from Where One Goes
“All those innocents-I didn't wonder about their futures
that day as I left the abandoned house. I couldn't know their destinations, their triumphs, their troubles. The ones who integrated themselves into new cities and forgot themselves in new professions, either forming empires grand enough to blot out a past, or failing to thrive because they couldn't get the sound of their own blood out of their heads. The ones who married other survivors, and the ones who wouldn't marry because they had nothing to offer a
marriage bed but night terrors. The ones who took comfort and freedom in the soil of the kibbutz, and the ones who found themselves lying on a different set of tables, granting permission to other doctors to bum the branded memories from their brains, to take away, once and for all, the misery that he had imprinted upon us.
They were children, once.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“I need you more than I need freedom.”
― Lora Leigh, quote from Mercury's War
“The moon was through to the sunset side of the gap, but its light was hardly noticeable on the earth for the ruddy brilliance of the firelight.”
― William Golding, quote from The Inheritors
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