She wanted to tell him that it was all okay, that there was nothing to worry about, that the universe was a terrible, utterly uncaring place and then people came along and added suffering and injustic...
People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is....
Oh no, Ximenyr said, looking almost serious. One should never regret one’s excesses, only one’s failures of nerve.
Just because that was the start of a thousand sentimental stories didn’t mean that it didn’t actually happen.
I don’t care how self-righteous the Culture feels, or how many people the Idirans kill. They’re on the side of life—boring, old-fashioned biological life; smelly, fallible, short-sighted, God knows, b...
I am not answering these questions anymore, I said to him as I took my plate to the sink. We should have gone metric years ago.Iain Banks
Horza recalled that the Culture's attitude to somebody who believed in an omnipotent God was to pity them, and to take no more notice of the substance of their faith than one would take of the ramblin...
He had to treat him as the maniac he obviously was. The fact that his insanity was dressed in religious trappings meant nothing.
Ferbin's father had had the same robustly pragmatic view of religion as he’d had of everything else. In his opinion, only the very poor and downtrodden really needed religion, to make their laborious...
But what if someone kills somebody else?Gurgeh shrugged. They're slap-droned.Ah! This sounds more like it. What does that drone do?Follows you around and makes sure you never do it again.Is that all?W...
All societies are like that; the damping hand of the old and the firebrand youth together.
After doing extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single malt whiskies are good to drink.
The History Of The Universe In Three WordsCHAPTER ONEBang!CHAPTER TWOsssssCHAPTER THREEcrunch.THE END
You judged your own attractiveness - physically, psychologically and in terms of status - then you knew your level and could either raise or lower your sights accordingly, risking rejection but with t...
Their history wasn’t so far off the mean track, they were going through what a thousand other civilizations had gone through, and no doubt in the childhood of each of those there had been countless oc...
The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they’d wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they cr...
Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves
In a way Gurgeh’s very weakness saved him; he played so that it was not worth taking him for a long time, letting the other four fight it out. Later he attacked the two admirals when they had grown st...
He looked for the Culture ship, then told himself not to be stupid; it was probably still several trillion kilometers away. That was how divorced from human scale modern warfare had become. You could...
Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot, muttered