“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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“Here.” He lifted the jiswar into her arms. “You have the distinct appearance of a woman in need of something warm and furry.” The”
― K.M. Weiland, quote from Dreamlander
“The much lauded objective evidence is never triumphantly there; it is a mere aspiration or Grenzbegriff [limit or ideal notion] marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinking life … [But] when as empiricists we give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence, and still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think. Our great difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strength of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the terminus a quo of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the terminus ad quem. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to decide.”
― quote from The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
“So maybe I don't know what'll happen. But it's nice to have someone to not know with you.”
― Emery Lord, quote from The Names They Gave Us
“كل إنسان يمكن أن يقرأ كتابا، و لكن يحتاج المرء إلى عزم شديد، وإلى أن يقف نفسه على دراسة كل كلمة في الصفحة كي يستطيع أن يستخدمها في التغلب على حزنه وغمه.”
― Adele Faber, quote from How to Talk So Teens Will Listen and Listen So Teens Will Talk
“In the 50,000 years that followed—a time four to eight times shorter than the entire length of time the Neanderthals existed—the replacement crowd not only settled on almost every habitable speck of land on the planet, they developed technology that allowed them to go to the moon and beyond.”
― quote from Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes
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Meet Me at the Cupca...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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