Meg

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“He dallied a moment, soaking up the fresh, clean smell of the wood—he remembered a time when they’d taken a hunting cabin in the Loustrian Hills, just the two of them. The axe that came with the cabin was blunt; he’d sharpened it with a stone, hoping to impress her with his handiness, but then when he’d come to swing it at the first piece of wood the head had sailed off and disappeared into the trees. He could still exactly recall her laughter, and then, when he must have looked hurt, her kiss.

They had slept under furs on a platform of moss. He remembered one cold morning when the fire had gone out overnight and it was freezingly cold in the cabin and they had coupled, him straddling her, his teeth nipped gently in the fur at the nape of her neck, moving slowly over and in her, watching the smoke of her breath as it billowed in the sunlight and rolled out across the room to the window, where it froze in curving, recursive motifs; a coalescence of pattern out of chaos.”
― Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.”
― Iain M. Banks, Excession

“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