Iain Quotes

The smell was that of a sewer under an abattoir. ~ Iain M. Banks

Even though he is mad and I am sane. ~ Iain Banks

These things I'd learned when I was young: Life is short and men are cruel, and ponies are born to suffer. I decided that I would work as hard as I could at whatever job I was given, believing that I would earn my reward in the end and live forever in the ponies' place. ~ Iain Lawrence

For all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not yet fully woken up, and events within its sleek hull still moved to another, slower tempo, made half of dreams. ~ Iain Banks

The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea remotely seriously. ~ Iain M. Banks

He hit and fatally injured my innocent and unfortunate uncle whose muttered last words in hospital, before his coma became a full stop, were: 'My God, the buggers've learned to fly ... ~ Iain Banks

Civilization depends on continually making the effort, of never giving in. It needs to be cared for by men of goodwill, protected from the dark. ~ Iain Pears

The problem with the chemicals in my head is they lead to feelings in the rest of me. ~ Iain S. Thomas

I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk. ~ Iain Banks

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."
"So ... your religion dies with you. How sad," Dorolow said, looking back from Horza to the screen. The Changer let the remark pass. ~ Iain Banks

I hide because there's more to me than what you see and I'm not sure you'd like the rest. I know that sometimes, I don't like the rest. ~ Iain Thomas

I've been aware of the work I do as an actor being directorial in feel. ~ Iain Glen

But God will live in our midst only as the King, nothing less. ~ Iain M. Duguid

The words 'believe' and 'repent' are now largely replaced by other terms such as "Give your life to Christ', 'Open your heart to Christ', 'Do it now', 'Surrender completely', 'Decide for Christ', etc., and in similar language those who profess conversion are sometimes represented as having 'given in'. ~ Iain H. Murray

He could describe walking towards the Taj Mahal – ho-hum, thinks the reader, immediately in the realm of the tacky postcard – and still give you a wholly fresh impression of the exact scale and actual presence of that white tomb; delicate but powerful, compact and yet boundlessly imposing. Epic grace. With those two words he encapsulated it, and you knew exactly what he meant. ~ Iain Banks

I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was at the moment. ~ Iain M. Banks

Getting comprehensively lost in a car with a full tank of petrol at someone else's expense, you can't beat it. ~ Iain Sinclair

Well." Vivien smiled, swinging her legs. "At least when Iain starts yelling, his accent gets thicker, so you usually can't understand a word he's ... No, don't pull that one," she stopped me suddenly. "That one I do recognize. It's some sort of a daisy, or something. ~ Susanna Kearsley

There are few more powerful tools for promoting stability than the institution of marriage. ~ Iain Duncan Smith

I believe that Fairport, in all its incarnations, has almost single-handedly been responsible for and has written the book on the history of the evolution of folk-rock in the UK. Over the years Ashley Hutchings, with his Albion Bands and Richard through his solo work have carried the torch to another level. ~ Iain Matthews

Meanwhile the Mind of Pittance watched over them, and looked out into the resounding silence and the sun-freckled darkness of the spaces between the stars, forever content and ineffably satisfied with the absence of anything remotely interesting happening. ~ Iain M. Banks

It was a beautiful voice. He wanted to reply to it. But he couldn't work out how to. It was very dark. 'Cheradenine?' A very patient voice. Concerned, somehow, but a hopeful voice; a cheerful, even loving voice. He tried to remember his mother. 'Cheradenine?' the voice said again. ~ Iain M. Banks

When families are strong and stable, so are children - showing higher levels of wellbeing and more positive outcomes. But when things go wrong - either through family breakdown or a damaged parental relationship - the impact on a child's later life can be devastating. ~ Iain Duncan Smith

We do a disservice to society if we ignore the evidence which shows that stable families tend to be associated with better outcomes for children. ~ Iain Duncan Smith

You really are being quite foolish to smoke. ~ Iain Glen

They sought to take the unfairness out of existence, to remove the mistakes in the transmitted message of life which gave it any point or advancement ... ~ Iain M. Banks

They spend time. That's just it. They spend time traveling. The time weighs heavily on them because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives. They persist in hoping that something they think they'll find in the place they're heading for will somehow provide them with a fulfilment they feel certain they deserve and yet have never come close to experiencing. ~ Iain M. Banks

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. ~ Iain Banks

It made me feel good to know that I could see him and he couldn't see me, and that I was aware and fully conscious and he wasn't ~ Iain Banks

Never apologize for how you feel. No one can control how they feel. The sun doesn't apologize for being the sun. The rain doesn't say sorry for falling. Feelings just are ~ Iain S. Thomas

I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away. ~ Iain M. Banks

Behind it, still expanding, still radiating, still slowly dissolving in the system to which it had given its name, the unnumbered twinkling fragments of the Orbital called Vavatch blew out toward the stars, drifting on a stellar wind that rang and swirled with the fury of the world's destruction. ~ Iain M. Banks

1/ Serene
2/ In a world full of troubles
3/ i.e. Doing nothing about it. ~ Iain Banks

They were enemies, they had both been very close to death and the other had done little or nothing to intervene, but actually to kill her would be very difficult.
Or maybe he only wanted to pretend that he would find it very difficult; maybe it would be no bother at all, and the sort of bogus camaraderie of doing the same job, though on different sides, was just that: a fake. ~ Iain M. Banks

As C. S. Lewis reminds us: In all our discussions of Hell we should keep steadily before our eyes the possible damnation, not of our enemies nor of our friends (since both these disturb the reason) but of ourselves. This [doctrine] is not about your wife or son, nor about Nero or Judas Iscariot; it is about you and me. ~ Iain M. Duguid

Walking is nonverbal communication. Like I can tell if [she's] mad by her footsteps. Walking isn't as overt as other signals, like the way someone smells, their voice, their laugh, their facial expressions. Steps can be frivolous, but they're often distinct from person to person. Familiarity grows over time, slowly, inadvertently. I never tried to get to know her walk deliberately. This stuff happens unwittingly... Living with someone can't be simulated or rehearsed. It has to be experienced, in real time. There is no substitute for shared involvement, for creating actual memories. Like, I know how [she] blows her nose. I've never thought about it until now, but I do. I know the cadence, the rhythm. She does it in the same tempo every time. These observations - her footsteps, how she blows her nose - they're like little secrets. ~ Iain Reid

But life isn't something that should be edited. Life shouldn't be cut. The only way you'll ever discover what it truly means to be alive and human is by sharing the full experience of what it means to be human and each blemish and freckle that comes with it. ~ Iain Thomas

It was a warship, after all. It was built, designed to glory in destruction, when it was considered appropriate. It found, as it was rightly and properly supposed to, an awful beauty in both the weaponry of war and the violence and devastation which that weaponry was capable of inflicting, and yet it knew that attractiveness stemmed from a kind of insecurity, a sort of childishness. It could see that - by some criteria - a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgment implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of the weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy. ~ Iain M. Banks

Even as a raft, of course, it could have been made from gold, or any element with a molecular number lower than mercury. Lead would still sink in mercury, but gold shouldn't. It was one number down the Periodic Table and so ought to float. Veppers looked over the side of the vessel at where his ingot of gold had entered the liquid metal, but it showed no sign of surfacing yet. ~ Iain M. Banks

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

I didn't sleep with Brodick," she blurted out. "I have no need for a priest."
"Yes, you did too."
"Alec, it isn't polite to contradict your elders."
"But, Mama ... "
"Hush, sweetheart."
Gillian glared at Brodick. He could easily correct this horrid misunderstanding if he would only offer a quick explanation.
He wasn't inclined. He winked at her. "I didn't know a face could get that red," he remarked.
"Do explain," she demanded.
"Explain what?" he asked, feigning innocence.
She turned to Judith. "We were camping ... and it isn't what it sounds like ... I did sleep, and when I awakened ... they were all there ... "
"They?" Iain asked.
"His soldiers."
"You slept with his soldiers too? ~ Julie Garwood

I'm not sure I'm the sort of actor people are hugely interested in finding out an awful lot about. ~ Iain Glen

He (Knox) handles the doctrines of election and justification as causes for bright joy in believers. 'Your imperfections shall have no power to damn you,' he writes to Mrs. Bowes, 'for Christ's perfection is reputed to be yours by faith, which you have in his blood.' 'God has received already at the hands of His only Son all that is due for our sins, and so cannot his justice require or crave any more of us, other satisfaction or recompense for our sins. ~ Iain Murray

What did you discover about the shooter?" Jude asked as he struggled to sit upright.
"Once I spotted him on the rooftop, I ran up the back stairs to follow him. He was long gone, but he left something behind," Sussex said.
"Oh?"
"Yes, I'll take it upon myself to investigate it."
Jude opened his eyes, his stare focused on the duke. "Do you need my help?"
Alynwick snorted. "A soiled dove with a broken wing," he drawled. "What use would you be?"
Jude grumbled, "I'll be fine by the morning. ~ Charlotte Featherstone

Let's be clear: unless I have profoundly misunderstood its position, I pretty much despise American Libertarianism. Have these people seriously looked at the problems of the world and thought, 'Hmm, what we need here is a bit more selfishness'? . . . I beg to differ. ~ Iain Banks

Politics bores you?" Bronsen said.
Julien smiled. "It does. Apologies, sir, and it is not that I haven't tried to be fascinated. But careful and meticulous research has suggested the hypothesis that all politicians are liars, fools, and tricksters, and I have as yet come across no evidence to the contrary. They can do great damage, and rarely any good. It is the job of the sensible man to try and protect civilization from their depradations. ~ Iain Pears

The simple fact that something has not been done, is no proof that it cannot be. ~ Iain Pears

He tried to decide if he was really ashamed of being afraid, and decided that he was not. Fear was there for a purpose. It was wired into any creature that had not completely turned its back on its evolutionary inheritance and so remade itself in whatever image it coveted. The more sophisticated you became, the less you relied on fear and pain to keep you alive; you could afford to ignore them because you had other means of coping with the consequences if things went badly. ~ Iain M. Banks

The ship told you a guilty system recognises no innocents. I'd say it does. It recognises the innocence of a young child, for example, and you saw how they treated that. In a sense it even recognises the "sanctity" of the body… but only to violate it. Once again, Gurgeh, it all boils down to ownership, possession; about taking and having. ~ Iain M. Banks

It is not rational to assume, without evidence, that rationality can disclose everything about the world, just because it can disclose some things. Our intuition in favour of rationality, where we are inclined to use it, is just that - an intuition. Reason is founded in intuition and ends in intuition, like a pair of massive bookends. ~ Iain McGilchrist

Can't machines build these faster?" he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell."Why, of course!" she laughed."Then why do you do it?""It's fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think, I helped build that. The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn't alter the fact that it was you who actually did it."
"Hmm," he said.
"Well, you may 'hmm' as you wish," the woman said, approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship, where a few other construction workers were standing, pointing inside the model and talking. "But have you ever been gliding or swum underwater?"
"Yes," he agreed.
The woman shrugged. "Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?"
He smiled. "I suppose not."
"You suppose correctly," the woman said. "And why?" She looked at him, grinning. "Because it's fun. ~ Iain M. Banks

Everyone changes so slowly, they don't even know that they have. And everyone likes to pretend that things are just the same yet they look at you like you could bring something back that's supposed to already be here. But home is a time. Not just a place. ~ Iain Thomas

Father is a school manqué ... He always wanted to write books. But he became rich instead, so is not allowed. ~ Iain Pears

I mean, nobody tells you sex is going to be so _noisy_, do they? ... ~ Iain Banks

Problem is, finding a killer in the woods is a lot like trying to find a needle in a haystack. ~ Iain Rob Wright

You can hold beliefs and not always believe in them. ~ Iain Reid

Faith is belief without reason; we operate on reason and nothing but. I have zero faith in my crew, just absolute confidence. ~ Iain M. Banks

We all know writing is a reclusive, lonely endeavour. It just is. But nobody writes alone. ~ Iain Reid

In Shakespeare, unique individuals repudiate the stereotypes demanded by the structure of the play: Shylock commands our sympathy, Barnardine refuses to be hanged. Individuals trump the category. ~ Iain McGilchrist

Sovereignty is not to be considered as an attribute of God-in the sense of being a quality which exists in God (such as omnipotence and omniscience)-rather it is the result of His attributes. ~ Iain H. Murray

That everything you want to happen, will happen, if you decide you want it enough. That every time you think a sad thought, you can think a happy one instead.
That you control that completely.
That the people who make you laugh are more beautiful than beautiful people. That you laugh more than you cry. That crying is good for you. That the people you hate wish you would stop and you do too.
That your friends are reflections of the best parts of you. That you are more than the sum total of the things you know and how you react to them. That dancing is sometimes more important than listening to the music.
That the most embarrassing, awkward moments of your life are only remembered by you and no one else ~ Iain S. Thomas

the difference between the living and the dead. The living run away when you shoot at them. ~ Iain Rob Wright

This is a perfectly good picture. And if I didn't know you, I would be impressed and charmed. But I do know you."
He thought some more, wondering whether he dared say precisely what he felt, for he knew he could never explain exactly why the idea came to him. "It's the painting of a dutiful daughter," he said eventually, looking at her cautiously to see her reaction. "You want to please. You are always aware of what the person looking at this picture will think of it. Because of that you've missed something important. Does that make sense?"
She thought, then nodded. "All right," she said grudgingly and with just a touch of despair in her voice. "You win."
Julien grunted. "Have another go, then. I shall come back and come back until you figure it out."
"And you'll know?"
"You'll know. I will merely get the benefit of it. ~ Iain Pears

Because I do enjoy winning, because I do have something nobody can copy, something nobody else can have; I'm me; I'm one of the best. ~ Iain M. Banks

I'm not a great believer in awards-of course the fact that I've never won one has nothing to do with it at all! ~ Iain Banks

She followed the melting flakes, revelling in the thickness, the softness of his hair, which he wore long. She had loved to run her fingers through it before. Tug at it in mounting pleasure. Snuggle into it in the shared intimacy of their loving. ~ Charlotte Featherstone

You've got such beautiful words but none I can eat, none which block the rain, none which bandage my wounds, none which build a home.
Nothing beautiful, which did not work, ever became anything more than pretty ~ Iain S. Thomas

A guilty system recognizes no innocents. ~ Iain M. Banks

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 crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages." The avatar hesitated. It put its head a little to one side and narrowed its eyes. "How far do I have to take this analogy, Cr. Ziller?". ~ Iain M. Banks

Do you wish to speak in Provençal, French, or Latin? They are all I can manage, I'm afraid."

"Any will do," the rabbi replied in Provençal.

"Splendid. Latin it is," said Pope Clement. ~ Iain Pears

They also,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, 'refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value; carbon fascists. ~ Iain M. Banks

A Mind could hold any set of facts and opinions it wanted without having to tell anybody what it knew or thought, or why. ~ Iain M. Banks

[I]t would be a niceness that was enforced leniently, patiently and gracefully, with the sort of unflappable self-certainty [they] couldn't help displaying when all its statistics proved that it really was doing the right thing. ~ Iain M. Banks

That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off ... and still have no good idea why you were really fighting. ~ Iain Banks

I hope that if love hurts, it teaches you something about yourself or about someone else. ~ Iain S. Thomas

It could always all be unreal - how could you ever tell otherwise? You took it on trust, in part because what would be the point of doing anything else? When the fake behaved exactly like the real, why treat it as anything different? You gave it the benefit of the doubt, until something proved otherwise. ~ Iain M. Banks

[A]ll her hardships had been self-inflicted and recreational in the past. ~ Iain M. Banks

Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces.
You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew.
I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. ~ Iain Pears

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

The ball itself was for over a thousand people, about half of them game-players; the rest were mostly partners of the players, or officials, priests, officers and bureaucrats who ~ Iain M. Banks

Hup! ... and here we are, waking up. Quick scan around, nothing immediately threatening, it would seem ... Hmm. Floating in space. Odd. Nobody else around. That's funny. View's a bit degraded. Oh-oh, that's a bad sign. Don't feel quite right, either. Stuff missing here ... Clock running way slow, like it's down amongst the electronics crap ... Run full system check ... Oh, good grief! ~ Iain M. Banks

[E]very society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximize that effect, and some try to minimize it. You come from one of the latter and you're being asked to explain yourself to one of the former. Prevarication will be more difficult than you imagine; neutrality is probably impossible. You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence. ~ Iain M. Banks

You're spoilt as an actor if you are in that small percentage that works regularly. ~ Iain Glen

It is a work of psychogeography, albeit in a less explicit sense than Iain Sinclair's or Will Self's. It had to be fiction though, because I needed that freedom of including whatever belonged, and cutting out whatever didn't. The main fiction in it was matching Julius' generous and self-concealing character to New York's generous and self-concealing character. I think this also adds to my answer about New York's personality in the book. ~ Teju Cole

although individuals and small events did affect the course of historical development, the influence of even major figures was strictly limited. In ~ Iain Pears

This is why it hurts the way it hurts.
You have too many words in your head. There are too many ways to describe the way you feel. You will never have the luxury of a dull ache.
You must suffer through the intricacy of feeling too much ~ Iain S. Thomas

The number one priority now is reducing the deficit that they [Labour] left us - the biggest deficit since the Second World War. ~ Iain Duncan Smith

Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated. ~ Iain Banks

Some who were not yet ready to venture into the chapel on Sundays might well put in their first appearance on a Saturday night to see what Y dyn bach ('the little man') had got to say. (The Welsh term has an element of affection in it not obvious in the English) ~ Iain H. Murray

Some problems were generational; you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types. ~ Iain M. Banks

Somehow, later, exhausted and dismayed by these sapping, abrasive, attriting episodes, they came to a sort of truce; but it was at the expense of any closeness. ~ Iain M. Banks

Too many couples break up without understanding the consequences for their families. ~ Iain Duncan Smith

The catechisms also tell the truth about who I am, what I want and how I feel, and it can be unsettling to hear yourself described as you have thought of yourself in your most honest and abject moods, just as it is humbling to hear what you have thought about in your most hopeful and unrealistic moments. ~ Iain Banks

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

Future became Present, Present became Past. A truth so banal, so obvious and accepted that he had somehow managed to ignore it before. ~ Iain Banks

My enemy is twice dead, and I still have him. ~ Iain Banks

History is a series of difficult choices. The only reason there's anything left of the human race, the only reason we're still here is because men like me made those difficult choices ~ Iain S. Thomas

You cannot fix me because I am not broken. And even though everything has changed, I am still more than I've ever been. ~ Iain S. Thomas

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. ~ Iain Banks

People make the mistake of assuming far too many things about armies,' Lefevre told me one evening. 'They assume, for a start, that generals know what they are doing and know what is going on. They assume that orders pass down from top to bottom in a smooth and regulated fashion. And above all they assume that wars start only when people decide to start them.' 'You are going to tell me that is not the case?' 'Wars begin when they are ready, when humanity needs a bloodletting. Kings and politicians and generals have little say in it. You can feel it in the air when one is brewing. There is a tension and nervousness on the face of the least soldier. They can smell it coming in a way politicians cannot. The desire to hurt and destroy spreads over a region and over the troops. And then the generals can only hope to have the vaguest notion of what they are doing. ~ Iain Pears