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Book: The Algebraist
Quotes of Book: The Algebraist
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  1. Iain M. Banks _ The Algebraist

    You judged your own attractiveness - physically, psychologically and in terms of status - then you knew your level and could either raise or lower your sights accordingly, risking rejection but with the possibility of advancement, or settling for a more reliably stable life but never knowing what you might have achieved.
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  2. Iain M. Banks _ The Algebraist

    We are wasting time.Time wastes itself. Who are we to float in its way?
    book-quotetimewasted-timewaste

  3. Iain M. Banks _ The Algebraist

    If I had to guess, nephew, I would surmise that you are not in direct trouble as such. However, I will confess to the distinct and unsettling feeling that very large, very ponderous and most momentous wheels have been set in motion. When that happens I believe the lessons of history tend to indicate that it is best not to be in their way. Even without meaning harm, the workings and progress of such wheels are on a scale which inevitably reduces the worth of individual lives to an irrelevance at best.
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  4. Iain M. Banks _ The Algebraist

    {H}e was one of those people who got to the top of an organisation through luck, connections, the indulgence of superiors and that sort of carelessness towards others that the easily impressed termed ruthlessness and those of a less gullible nature called sociopathy. But sometimes, just through his sheer unthinking brusqueness and inability to think through the consequences of a remark, he said what everybody else was only thinking. A comic poet working in obscene doggerel.
    book-quoteincompetence

  5. Iain M. Banks _ The Algebraist

    I have a story to tell you. It has many beginnings, and perhaps one ending. Perhaps not. Beginnings and endings are contingent things anyway; inventions, devices. Where does any story really begin? There is always context, always an encompassingly greater epic, always something before the described events, unless we are to start every story with "BANG! Expand! Sssss…," then itemize the whole subsequent history of the universe before settling down, at last, to the particular tale in question. Similarly, no ending is final, unless it is the end of all things…
    book-quotestoriesendingsending

  6. Iain M. Banks _ The Algebraist

    It was a truism that all civilizations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.
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  7. Iain M. Banks _ The Algebraist

    Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.
    book-quotesolipsism
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