Scottish author (1954-2013)
The swirling mist lay in the bottom of such great bowls like a broth of dreams.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
Welcome to the future.... All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness.
IAIN M. BANKS
Matter
Why had he done it? Why couldn't it just not have happened? Why didn't they have time-travel, why couldn't he go back and stop it happening? Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every cell in your body from light-years off, but he wasn't able to go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision.
IAIN M. BANKS
The Player of Games
On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take years and generations to manifest themselves.
IAIN M. BANKS
The State of the Art
Hell was always for other people.
IAIN M. BANKS
Surface Detail
He had to treat him as the maniac he obviously was. The fact that his insanity was dressed in religious trappings meant nothing.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky.
IAIN M. BANKS
The State of the Art
It was like living half your life in a tiny, stuffy, warm gray box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better ... and then discovering a little hole in one corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get a finger into, and tease and pull at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you ... so that you stepped out of the tiny box's confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh air and found yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests, soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snowfields and a stunning, breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn't even the start of the real story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the first syllable of the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the first volume of the story.
IAIN M. BANKS
Excession
While the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once.
IAIN M. BANKS
The State of the Art
One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them.
IAIN M. BANKS
The Player of Games
I shall not be disappointed to leave all you bastards behind.
IAIN BANKS
The Quarry
And us? Just another belch in the darkness. Sound but not word, noise without meaning.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
We created something a little closer to perfection than ourselves; maybe that’s the only way to progress. Let them try to do the same.
IAIN M. BANKS
The State of the Art
Here, in the bare dark face of night
A calm unhurried eye draws sight
--We see in what we think we fear
The cloudings of our thought made clear.
IAIN M. BANKS
Excession
A guilty system recognizes no innocents.
IAIN M. BANKS
The Player of Games
That is the way with all of your kind… It is how you are made; you must all strive to claw your way over the backs of your fellow humans during the short time you are permitted in the universe, breeding when you can, so that the strongest strain survive and the weakest die. I would no more blame you for that than I would try to convert some non-sentient carnivore to vegetarianism. You are all on your own side.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
We are ice and snow, we are that trapped state.
We are water falling, itinerant and vague, ever seeking the lowest level, trying to collect and connect.
We are vapor, raised against our own devices, made nebulous, blown on whatever wind arises. To start again, glacial or not.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
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
Inversions
Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess.
IAIN M. BANKS
The State of the Art
Money is a sign of poverty.
IAIN M. BANKS
The State of the Art