Inversions
Iain M. Banks
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.”
“Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves”
“Yet at the same time there is something about her deportment which I – and I suspect most other males – find off-putting, and even slightly threatening. A certain immodest forthrightness in her bearing is the cause of this, perhaps, plus the suspicion that while she pays flawless lip service to the facts of life which dictate the accepted and patent preeminence of the male, she does so with a sort of unwarranted humour, producing in us males the unsettlingly contrary feeling that she is indulging us.”
“The only sin is selfishness.”
“Patience can be a means of letting matters mature to a proper state for action, not just a way of letting time slip away.”
“As you say, DeWar, our shame comes from the comparison. We know we might be generous and compassionate and good, and could behave so, yet something else in our nature makes us otherwise." She smiled a small, empty smile. "Yes, I feel something I recognise as love. Something I remember, something I may discuss and mill and theorise over." She shook her head. "But it is not something I know. I am like a blind woman taking about how a tree must look, or a cloud. Love is something I have a dim memory of, the way someone who went blind in their early childhood might recall the sun, or the face of their mother. I know affection from my fellow whore-wives, DeWar, and I sense regard from you and feel some in return. I have a duty to the Protector, just as he feels he has a duty to me. As far as that goes, I am content. But love? That is for the living, and I am dead.”
“You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing.”
“during the ball he was quickly persuaded, principally by himself, that the definition of fruit juice might include wine”
“Division was the only order.”
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Book Keywords:
belief, foreigners, philosophy, cognitive-dissonance, confirmation-bias, patience, order, ressentiment, sin, state-of-nature, wisdom, selfishness
