“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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“When the fig-tree stood without fruit no one looked at it. Wishing by producing this fruit be praised by men, it was bent and broken by them.”
― Leonardo da Vinci, quote from Leonardo's Notebooks
“Chores are easier if forethought is given to them and they are looked upon as little pleasures to perform instead of inconveniences that steal time and try the patience.”
― quote from One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey
“Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends.
Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.”
― Joyce Cary, quote from The Horse's Mouth
“You see, literary culture is perpetually dead and dying; and when some respected writer discovers and loudly proclaims the finality of this fact, it is a forensic marker of their own decomposition. It means that they have artistically expired within the last ten years, and that they will corporeally expire within the next twenty.”
― Paul Collins, quote from Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
“Granny Trill and Granny Wallon were traditional ancients of a kind we won’t see today, the last of that dignity of grandmothers to whom age was its own embellishment. The grandmothers of those days dressed for the part in that curious but endearing uniform which is now known to us only through music-hall. And our two old neighbours, when setting forth on errands, always prepared themselves scrupulously so. They wore high laced boots and long muslin dresses, beaded chokers and candlewick shawls, crowned by tall poke bonnets tied with trailing ribbons and smothered with inky sequins. They looked like starlings, flecked with jet, and they walked in a tinkle of darkness.
Those severe and similar old bodies enthralled me when they dressed that way. When I finally became King (I used to think) I would command a parade of grandmas, and drill them, and march them up and down - rank upon rank of hobbling boots, nodding bonnets, flying shawls, and furious chewing faces. They would be gathered from all the towns and villages and brought to my palace in wagon-loads. No more than a monarch’s whim, of course, like eating cocoa or drinking jellies; but far more spectacular any day than those usual trudging guardsmen.”
― Laurie Lee, quote from Cider With Rosie
Empire Falls
The Fountainhead
Harriet the Spy
Night World, No. 2
Fallen Too Far
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