Surface Detail Quotes

“The truth is not always useful, not always good. It’s like putting your faith in water. Yes, we need the rain, but too much can sweep you away in a flood and drown you. Like all great natural, elemental forces, the truth needs to be channeled, managed, controlled and intelligently, morally allocated.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“-"Then what," Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar´s obvious enthusiasm, "is making you smile about a disaster?"

-"Well, first, I didn´t cause it! Nothing to do with me, hands clean. Always a bonus.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“There was nothing worse, Veppers thought, than a loser who’d made it. It was just part of the way things worked – part of the complexity of life, he supposed – that sometimes somebody who absolutely deserved nothing more than to be one of the down-trodden, the oppressed, the dregs of society, lucked out into a position of wealth, power and admiration.
At least people who were natural winners knew how to carry themselves in their pomp, whether their ascendancy had come through the luck of being born rich and powerful or the luck of being born ambitious and capable. Losers who’d made it always let the side down. Veppers was all for arrogance – he possessed the quality in full measure himself, as he’d often been informed – but it had to be deserved, you had to have worked for it. Or at the very least, an ancestor had to have worked for it.
Arrogance without cause, arrogance without achievement – or that mistook sheer luck for true achievement – was an abomination. Losers made everybody look bad. Worse, they made the whole thing – the great game that was life – appear arbitrary, almost meaningless. Their only use, Veppers had long since decided, was as examples to be held up to those who complained about their lack of status or money or control over their lives: look, if this idiot can achieve something, so can anybody, so can you. So stop whining about being exploited and work harder.
Still, at least individual losers were quite obviously statistical freaks. You could allow for that, you could tolerate that, albeit with gritted teeth. What he would not have believed was that you could find an entire society – an entire civilization– of losers who’d made it.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“Naturally, also, both sides were convinced they had right on their side, not that either was remotely naive enough to think that had any possible bearing on the outcome whatsoever.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“Though drones, avatars and even humans are one thing; the loss of any is not without moral and diplomatic import, of course, but might be dismissed as merely unfortunate and regrettable, something to be smoothed over through the usual channels. Attacking a ship, on the other hand, is an unambiguous act of war.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“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, Surface Detail

“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, Surface Detail

“Almost every developing species had a creation myth buried somewhere in its past, even if by the time they’d become space-faring it was no more than a quaint and dusty irrelevance (though, granted, some were downright embarrassing). Talking utter drivel about thunderclouds having sex with the sun, lonely old sadists inventing something to amuse themselves with, a big fish spawning the stars, planets, moons and your own ever-so-special People – or whatever other nonsense had wandered into the most likely feverish mind of the enthusiast who had come up with the idea in the first place – at least showed you were interested in trying to provide an explanation for the world around you, and so was generally held to be a promising first step towards coming up with the belief system that provably worked and genuinely did produce miracles: reason, science and technology.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“Insult, like many such feelings, is experienced in the soul of the person addressed; it is not something that can be granted or withheld by the person doing the addressing.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“An intelligence completely dissociated from the physical, or at least an impression of it, was a strange, curiously limited and almost perverse thing, and the precise form that your physicality took had a profound, in some ways defining influence on your personality.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“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, Surface Detail

“All you ever were was a piece of the universe thinking to itself”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“Shut up!” Bettlescroy shouted, one tiny fist thudding down on the desk beneath the screen. “The Culture vessel has also already worked out how to get the fabricaria-built ships to set about destroying each other, which might result in the ships annihilating themselves even quicker; within a matter of hours. It would appear only to be holding back from this course because it fears some of the ships might accidentally or mistakenly damage the fabricaria, a consequence it wishes to avoid if possible, to preserve the – and I quote – ‘unique techno-cultural monument that is the Tsungarial Disk’. That’s so thoughtful, don’t you think that’s so thoughtful? I think that’s so fucking thoughtful.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“Just as one might do useful work without fully understanding the job one was engaged in, or even what the point of it was, so the behaviour of devotion still mattered to the all-forgiving God, and just as the habitual performance of a task gradually raised one’s skills to something close to perfection, bringing a deeper understanding of the work, so the actions of faith would lead to the state of faith.
Finally, she was shown the filthy, stinking, windowless cell carved into the rock beneath the Refuge where she would be chained, starved and beaten if she did not at least try to accept God’s love. She trembled as she looked at the shackles and the flails, and agreed she would do her best.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn’t stop his attention from wandering. The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their real worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detail. When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“And,” he said, looking round them all, “there will always be forces within the Culture who will exact revenge. Again, no matter what.” Vatueil paused, looked grim. “I think we all know the saying: ‘Don’t fuck with the Culture.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“Veppers sat with Jasken, Lehktevi – another of his Harem-girls – and Crederre, the daughter of Sapultride”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“Prin,” she’d told him, just before the session started, while they’d been waiting in the antechamber and Errun”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“It is like a dream, Vatueil”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“The Fast Picket The Usual But Etymologically Unsatisfactory slipped away from the GSV Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly, slung out in a great elongated nest of fields that decelerated it to speeds the Fast Picket’s engines could cope with.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“The Restoria section was the Culture’s current specialist contribution to this age-old struggle. As often known as Pest Control as by its official title, it was made up of experts in the management, amelioration and – if necessary – obliteration of hegswarms.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“she was revented aboard the GSV Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“I’m sure we’ll get on just fine,” Lededje said.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“This was the Culture General Systems Vehicle Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amongst Folly,”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“Most Culture cities, where they existed at all, resembled giant snowflakes, with greenery – or at least countryside, in whatever colour or form – penetrating almost to the heart of the conurbation.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“It was a strange, invasively unpleasant feeling, like a spreading itch inside her skull she could not scratch. She felt the lace using her drug glands to jink her already quickened senses and reactions up to one of her pre-agreed maxima.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail

“She tried to remember when she’d last backed up. Months ago? She wasn’t even sure.”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail