Look to Windward (Culture, #7)

by Iain M. Banks

the universe does not have our own best interests at heart, and to assume for a moment that it does, ever did or ever might is to make the most calamitous and hubristic of mistakes.

people are happy to adopt epithets they would fight to the death to throw off had they been imposed.”

“Some travel forever in hope and are serially disappointed. Others, slightly less self-deceiving, come to accept that the process of traveling itself offers, if not fulfilment, then relief from the feeling that they should be feeling fulfilled”.

people control their terrors. They can choose to sample them, repeat them or avoid them. That is not the same as living beneath the volcano when you’ve just invented the wheel, or wondering whether your levee will break and drown your entire village.

if you were constructing a sentience that was or could easily become much greater than your own, it would not be in your interest to create a being which loathed you and might be likely to set about dreaming up ways to exterminate you.

It was more or less accepted in some quarters that the Culture’s whole civilizational demeanor resulted from the fact that every single human in the society had been thoroughly, comprehensively and imaginatively spoiled as a child by virtually everyone around them.

The dead escape death in heaven, and the living escape life in dreams.”

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.

For a work of such self-referential artifice to be attritionally sculpted by what passes for the forces of nature around here seemed appropriate to me.”

It is the struggle that they crave.

being able to say you were just obeying orders.” “Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civilizationally.”

War can alter your perceptions, change your sense of values.

true subjective time is measured in the minimum duration of demonstrably separate thoughts?

the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.”