Elena

“There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.”
― Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

“Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would still know she was part of you.”
― Iain Banks

“We teach people how to treat us.”
― Phillip C. McGraw

“I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.”
― Iain Banks, The Bridge