Mirela Mus

“Life buzzed in, fumed about, rattled around and quite thoroughly infested the entire galaxy, and probably - almost certainly - well beyond. The vast ongoingness of it all somehow put all one's own petty concerns and worries into context, making them seem not irrelevant, but of much less distressing immediacy.”
― Iain M. Banks, Matter

“My name,’ she said. ‘Is Rasd-Coduresa Diziet Embless Sma da’ Marenhide.”
― Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons

“The Minds did not assume such distinctions; to them, there was no cutoff between the two. Tactics cohered into strategy, strategy disintegrated into tactics, in the sliding scale of their dialectical moral algebra. It was all more than they ever expected the mammal brain to cope with. He recalled what Sma had said to him, long long ago back in that new beginning (itself the product of so much guilt and pain); that they dealt in the intrinsically untoward, where rules were forged as you went along and were never the same twice anyway, where just by the nature of things nothing could be known or predicted or even judged with any real certainty. It all sounded very sophisticated and abstract and challenging to work with, but in the end it came down to people and problems.”
― Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons

“It was like living half your life in a tiny, scruffy, warm grey box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better...and then discovering a little hole in the corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get your finger into, and tease and pull apart at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you... so that you stepped out of the tiny box's confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh air and found yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests, soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snow fields and a stunning, breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn't even the start of the real story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the first syllable of the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the first volume of the story.”
― Iain M. Banks, Excession