It was rude, insulting and frequently infuriating, but it made such a refreshing change from the awful politeness of most people.
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
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...
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual examp...
A guilty system recognizes no innocents.
Unbelievable. I’m in a fucking Outside Context situation, the ship thought, and suddenly felt as stupid and dumb-struck as any muddy savage confronted with explosives or electricity.
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 smell was that of a sewer under an abattoir.
Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves
It is especially important to remember that the ownership of humans is possible too; not in terms of actual slavery, which they are proud to have abolished, but in the sense that, according to which s...
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...
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 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...
Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you’re not doing it right.
Always try to avoid setting up future opportunities for kicking yourself.
The History Of The Universe In Three WordsCHAPTER ONEBang!CHAPTER TWOsssssCHAPTER THREEcrunch.THE END
Bipedal, oxygen-breathing carboniform
Where do you keep your memories of love, past lovers? QiRia looked at her. In my head, of course. He looked away. There are not so many of those, anyway, he said, voice a little quieter. Loving become...