And,” the man said with a smile, “it’s a good way of meeting people. One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way which ensured they would not become enemies again. Meanwhile, a war over the digitized souls of the dead is expanding from cyberspace into the real world. ― Iain M. Banks. Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. Banks's father was an officer in the Admiralty and his mother was once a professional ice skater. Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book Hence not giving out any names! forms that often have philosophical or religious import, like aphorisms But just because something does not have an ending doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a conclusion. It was glamorous but dangerous, possessed of an aura of roguish sexiness - there was no other word for it - which implied predation, seduction and even violation…No other part of the Culture more exactly represented what the society as a whole really stood for, or was more militant in the application of he Culture’s fundamental beliefs. “Don't you have a religion?" All but one justly fail. The answer is nothing. The Culture series consists of a series of ten novels set in this universe. What does that make you?”, “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 ramblings of somebody claiming to be Emperor of the Universe. In 2008, The Times named Banks in their list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”. ― Iain M. Banks, quote from Consider Phlebas, “Special Circumstances had always been the Contact section’s moral espionage weapon, the very cutting edge of the Culture’s interfering diplomatic policy, the elite of the elite, in a society which abhorred elitism. V. What the Thunder Said After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places The shouting and the crying Prison and palace and reverberation Of thunder of spring over distant mountains He who was living is now dead For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a form, mimics other literary forms (parables, biblical stories, etc.) ‘Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs’ – oh, please. 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.”, “The drone Unaha-Closp was fully repaired. that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but 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. Between your ears is the only place on this crate you’ll ever get any privacy, so make the most of it. There was something comforting about having a vast hydrogen furnace burning millions of tons of material a second at the centre of a solar system. Eliot, The Waste Land. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. They were soft and pampered and indulged, and the Contact section’s evangelical materialism provided their conscience-salving good works. A bored member of the Culture, Jernau Gurgeh, is blackmailed into being the Culture’s agent by a Special Circumstances drone, Flere-Imsaho, in a plan to subvert a brutal, hierarchical empire. The Gzilt, a civilization that joined Culture ten thousand years ago, has decided to Sublime, leaving behind ‘the Real’ and take up residence in higher dimensions.