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Iain Banks was a Scottish author. He wrote mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, including the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies .

After the publication and success of The Wasp Factory , Banks began to write on a full-time basis. His first science fiction book, Consider Phlebas, was released in 1987, marking the start of the Culture series. His books have been adapted for theatre, radio and television. In 2008, The Times named Banks in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". In April 2013, Banks announced that he had inoperable cancer and was unlikely to live beyond a year. He died on 9 June 2013. Wikipedia  

✵ 16. február 1954 – 9. jún 2013
Iain Banks fotka
Iain Banks: 139   citátov 2   Páči sa

Iain Banks: Citáty v angličtine

“Empires are synonymous with centralized—if occasionally schismatized—hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through—usually—a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society’s information dissemination systems and its lesser—as a rule nominally independent—power systems. In short, it’s all about dominance.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 1 (p. 91).

“All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 1 (p. 48).

““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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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 5 “Megaship” (p. 102).

“Well, he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. Here we are again.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Six (p. 178).

““Nothing is sacred to you, Mr. Munro. You base your beliefs on the products of human thought, so it could hardly be otherwise. You might believe in certain things, but you do not have faith. That comes with submission to the force of divine revelation.”
“So, because I don’t have what I think of as superstitions, because I believe we just happen to exist, and believe in… science, evolution, whatever; I’m not as… worthy as somebody who has faith in an ancient book and a cruel, desert God?””

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Iain Banks

“Piece” (p. 73)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

“Even the pain of what had felt on occasion like an irretrievably broken heart had consistently proved less lasting than she’d initially imagined and expected; the revelation that a boy’s taste was so grotesquely deficient he could prefer somebody else to her always reduced both the intensity and the duration of the anguish her heart demanded be endured to mark such a loss of regard.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 6 “Pittance” section III (p. 180).

“In all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Thirteen (p. 434).

““Is all this serious?” Gurgeh said, turning, amused, from the screen to the drone.
“Deadly serious,” Flere-Imsaho told him.
Gurgeh laughed and shook his head. He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 2 (p. 225).

“Of course, she does seem to be a rather good doctor. At the very least she has done the King no obvious harm, and that in my experience is far more than one might reasonably expect from a court physician.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 7 (p. 130)

“What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn’t lead to wisdom? And what’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Ten (p. 316).

“"What, now?" "Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy."”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Look to Windward page 213.
Culture series, Look to Windward (2000)

“He suspected the troops felt closer to somebody who spoke a different language but asked them questions than they did to somebody who shared their language and only ever used it to give orders.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Twelve (p. 394).

“Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.”

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Iain Banks kniha Transition

Transition ISBN 0-316-73107-2 p. 86.
Non-Culture Novels, Transition (2009)

““I had formed the impression the Protector valued your counsel.”
“It is most valued when it most closely accords with his own view.””

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 8 (p. 140)

“It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting—corruption and favoritism, mostly—endemic to the system.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 1 (p. 91).

“He looked up from it at the stars again, and the view was warped and distorted by something in his eyes, which at first he thought was rain.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 4 “The Passed Pawn” (p. 390).

“I am told he is something of a scholar, which is no bad thing in a king, providing it is not taken to excess.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Epilogue (p. 402)
Culture series, Inversions (1998)

“We only become beasts—we become worse than beasts—when we torment others.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 11 (p. 197)

“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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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 2 (p. 22)

“Such a stupid act. Sometimes heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination, the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn’t win medals but wars.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter VIII (p. 183).

“How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 11 “Regarding Gravious” section X (p. 372).

“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.”

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Iain Banks

“State of the Art” (p. 136)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

“There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means.”

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Iain Banks

“Descendant” (p. 40)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

“And coincidence convinces the credulous. Two things happen at the same time, or one after another, and we assume there must be a link; well, we sacrificed a virgin last year, and there was a good harvest. Of course the ceremony to raise the sun works—it comes up every morning, doesn’t it? I say my prayers each night and the world hasn’t ended yet…
Dung beetle thinking. Life is too complicated for there not to be continual coincidences, and we just have to come to terms with the fact that they merely happen and aren’t ordained, that some things occur for no real reason whatsoever, and that this is not a punishment and that is not a reward. Good grief; the most copper-bottomed, platinum-card proof of divine intervention, of some holy masterplan, would be if there were no coincidences at all! That really would look suspicious.”

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Iain Banks

“Piece” (p. 75)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

““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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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter IX (p. 147).

“More than anything else now, though, he wanted to save Darckense. He had seen too many dead, dry eyes, too much air-blackened blood, too much fly-blown flesh, to be able to relate such ghastly truths to the nebulous ideas of honor and tradition that people claimed they were fighting for. Only the well-being of one loved person seemed really worth fighting for now; it was all that seemed real, all that could save his sanity.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter I (p. 444).

“Pain, or even just discomfort, is like the warning sent by a frontier guard, sir. You are free to choose to ignore it, but you should not be unduly surprised if you are subsequently over-run by invaders.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 3 (p. 51)

“That was another thing she taught me. That you are what you do. To Providence—or Progress or the Future or before any other sort of judgment apart from our own conscience—what we have done, not what we have thought, is the result we are judged by.”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Prologue (p. 3)
Culture series, Inversions (1998)

“No! Get away from me, you wittering purple rogues! Away and become bankers the lot of you—admit what you really love!”

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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 3 (p. 45)

“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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Iain Banks Culture series

Zdroj: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 3 “Uninvited Guests” section IV (p. 104).