Quote

It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said. She laughed. 'Really?' The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. 'Oh, no. It's just something we tell ourselves.

Iain Banks

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Iain Banks
Age: 59 †
Born: 1954
Born: February 16
Died: 2013
Died: June 9
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Iain M. Banks
Iain Menzies Banks
Machines
Regret
Hand
Tell
Gripped
Hands
Shrugged
Humans
Gently
Something
Laughed
Really
Machine

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Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron I'm not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness, perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows time is on his side.
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Hersesy is denying the word of God, and the word of God is much more reliably expressed in the natural world as it’s revealed through reason and science than in what I have heard described wonderfully as “the giant book of Jewish fairy stories.
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Well, he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. Here we are again.
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A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.
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In so much of politics you're not allowed to disagree with what's been agreed.
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As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.
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I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid.
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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.
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Don't you have a religion? Dorolow asked Horza. Yes, he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. My survival.
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A guilty system recognizes no innocents.
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Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.
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There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.
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The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.
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I'm from out of town, he said breezily. This was true. He'd never been within a hundred light-years of the place.
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Torture is such a slippery slope as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons.
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What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?
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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
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Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.
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Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.
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One should never mistake pattern for meaning.
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