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Book: Inversions
Quotes of Book: Inversions
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  1. Iain M. Banks _ Inversions

    Once upon a time there was a magical land where every man was a king, every woman a queen, each boy a prince and all girl princesses. In this land there were no hungry people and no crippled people. Were there any poor people? - asked LattensThat depends what you mean. In a way no, because they could all have any amount of riches they wanted, but in a way yes, for there were people who chose to have nothing. Their hearts' desire was to be free from owning anything, and they usually preferred to stay in the desert or in the mountains or the forests, living in caves or trees or just wandering around. Some lived in the great cities, where they too just roved about. but wherever they chose to wander, the decision was always theirs.
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  2. Iain M. Banks _ Inversions

    Which would you rather have, Lattens?' UrLeyn asked his son. 'Good giants and monsters, or bad ones?' 'Bad ones!' Lattens shouted. He drew his wooden sword from its scabbard. 'So I can cut their heads off!
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  3. Iain M. Banks _ Inversions

    For are women not supposed to resist even those they would happily surrender to, so that when they resist a more brutal violation how can the man be sure that any struggle, any protestation is not merely for show?
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  4. Iain M. Banks _ Inversions

    I have a feeling it is not a happy story.' 'Indeed. Anything but. It is just that of women, especially young women, caught up in a war.' 'Ah.' 'You see? A story that scarcely needs to be told. The ingredients imply the finished article, and the method of its making, do they not? It
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  5. Iain M. Banks _ Inversions

    Yet my father died, I was forced to the throne, and although I knew I was not ready, I coped. I learned. I became a King by having to behave as one, not simply because I was my father's son and had been told long in advance that I would become so.
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  6. Iain M. Banks _ Inversions

    This water's freezing. Get the servants to bring some more hot. And bring more wine! Where's my goblet? What have you done with it?' The goblet, sunk in the bath in front of YetAmidous, had left a red stain in the milky water, like blood."
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  7. Iain M. Banks _ Inversions

    But there we are. Some things never do make perfect sense. There must be some explanation, and it is perhaps a little like the Doctrine of the Perfect Partner. We must be content to know that she exists, somewhere in the world, and try not to care overmuch that we will probably never meet her.
    book-quotesoulmate

  8. Iain M. Banks _ Inversions

    {M}y determined and strenuous endeavours to take in absolutely nothing of what I had regarded as entirely the most irrelevant part of my schooling had patently not met with total success
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  9. Iain M. Banks _ Inversions

    You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you're doing.
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  10. Iain M. Banks _ Inversions

    Division was the only order.
    book-quotestate-of-nature

  11. Iain M. Banks _ Inversions

    Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves
    book-quotewisdom

  12. Iain M. Banks _ Inversions

    Yet at the same time there is something about her deportment which I – and I suspect most other males – find off-putting, and even slightly threatening. A certain immodest forthrightness in her bearing is the cause of this, perhaps, plus the suspicion that while she pays flawless lip service to the facts of life which dictate the accepted and patent preeminence of the male, she does so with a sort of unwarranted humour, producing in us males the unsettlingly contrary feeling that she is indulging us.
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