Marain Quotes & Sayings

Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working. — Henri Matisse

Dodd resigned himself to what he called the delicate work of watching and carefully doing nothing. — Erik Larson

Maybe it's true that life begins at fifty. But everything else starts to wear out, fall out, or spread out. — Phyllis Diller

Up from the dark the moon begins to creep; and now a pallid, haggard face lifts she above the water-line: thus from the deep a drowned body rises solemnly. — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Marain, the Culture's quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person's sex in Marain, but they're not used in everyday conversation; in — Iain M. Banks

What Texans can dream, Texans can do. — George W. Bush

It had been briefed that when Culture people didn't speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other language, they lost the carefully balanced interpretative structure of the Culture language, left its subtle shifts of cadence, tone and rhythm behind for, in virtually every case, something much cruder. — Iain M. Banks

David Blunkett and I both take the same view that it is scandalous that someone from North Tyneside, Laura Spence, with the best qualifications and who wants to be a doctor, should be turned down by Oxford University using an interview system more reminiscent of the old school network and the old school tie than justice. It is about time for an end to that old Britain where what matters more are the privileges you are born with, rather than the potential you actually have. — Gordon Brown

Grand telegraphic discovery today ... Transmitted vocal sounds for the first time ... With some further modification I hope we may be enabled to distinguish ... the "timbre" of the sound. Should this be so, conversation viva voce by telegraph will be a fait accompli. — Alexander Graham Bell