Look to Windward (Culture, #7)

by Iain M. Banks

“Estodien,” Quilan said evenly, “I have thought of all of that and been through all of that. I have accused myself of all of these things that you mention, and in rather less temperate language than you have used. You find me at the end of the process you might have wished to initiate with such assertions, not the start.”

The point is: what happens in heaven?”. “Unknowable wonderfulness?”. “Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn’t represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.” “Have you always thought that?”. “If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual’s circumstances—and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse—then you don’t have life after death; you just have death.”