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Book: Surface Detail
Quotes of Book: Surface Detail

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.
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Iain M. Banks _ Surface Detail
Even the most urbanely sophisticated, scrupulously empathic and excruciatingly polite civilisation, it had been suggested, was just a hegswarm with a sense of proportion.
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Iain M. Banks _ Surface Detail
you needed ear defenders, and the swirling slipstream caused total havoc to any hairstyle worth the name.
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Iain M. Banks _ Surface Detail
The world was on fire; walls of smoke filled the sky, making a night lit up like hell, flames leaping from a hundred different places, trees and outbuildings all on fire or silhouetted against the fires beyond.
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Iain M. Banks _ Surface Detail
Contact was the part of the Culture that handled more or less every aspect of the Culture's interactions with everything and everybody that wasn't the Culture, from the investigation of unexplored star systems to relations with the entire panoply of other civilisations at every developmental level, from those still unable to scrape together the plan for a world government or a functioning space elevator to the elegantly otiose but nevertheless potentially deeply powerful Elders and the still more detached-from-reality Sublimed, where any vestige or trace of such exotic entities remained. Special Circumstances was, in effect, the Contact section's espionage wing.
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Iain M. Banks _ Surface Detail
He wept a little, and was proud of her, even though he knew such vicarious pride was mere sentimentality, arguably just a typically male attempt to appropriate some of her achievement for himself.
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Iain M. Banks _ Surface Detail
All very melodramatic. Your feud may inspire a not terribly good screen presentation at some point in the future, hopefully distant. I look forward to missing it.
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Iain M. Banks _ Surface Detail
All you ever were was a piece of the universe thinking to itself
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Iain M. Banks _ Surface Detail
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.
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Iain M. Banks _ Surface Detail
We're losing, he thought again. There is a war in heaven and we are losing it. The war was amongst the Heavens, between the Afterlives, if you wanted to be pedantic about it. And it was over the Hells.
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Iain M. Banks _ Surface Detail
what passed for useful information sharing within an organization was really just bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for upcoming failures and calamities, that were both entirely predictable, but seemingly completely unavoidable and telling each other what they all already knew. The trick was to be able to reengage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know that you stopped listening properly, shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth.
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Iain M. Banks _ Surface Detail
that was a tough position to hold when at the back of your mind was the niggling doubt that you really might not be saved when the time came, while at the back of everybody else's mind was a little device that was guaranteed to do precisely that.
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