Quotes from China Mieville

Through streets Cutter had once known now made strange by mortars, with neglected bunting in the colours of factions, with signs proclaiming idiot theories or new churches, new things, new ways of being, split and peeling. The raucousness and vigour were gone from the streets but still sensible in echo, in the buildings themselves: palimpsests of history, epochs, wars, other revolts embedded in their stones.

But here's the problem you're not addressing. While yes we can both agree the sudden recovery of this footage smells not a little, and that we appear to be bits of tinfoil-on-string to some malevolent government kitten, yes yes yes but, Borlú, however they've come by the evidence, this is the correct decision.

ANY MOMENT CALLED NOW IS ALWAYS FULL OF POSSIBLES. AT

If you didn't know, you wouldn't take him for part-ghost—but you'd know he wanted to be somewhere else.

There are gods and catastrophes.

Oratees are addicts. Strung out on an Ambassador's Language.

So what's your alternative?' people say, as if that's logic. We don't have to have an alternative, that's not how critique works. We may do, and if we do, you're welcome, but if we don't that no more invalidates our hate for this, for what is, than does that of a serf for her lord, her flail-backed insistence that this must end, whether or not she accompanies it with a blueprint for free wage labour.

As in Kiev, so across the cities of Russia, among the dreaming rich.

This is what I excelled at: the life-technique of aggregated skill, luck, laziness and chutzpah that we call floaking.

In those late days of summer, as the right ruminated a cleansing, there flourished a millennial indulgence.

Sham felt sure there was something he fervently wanted to do & to which he was excellently suited. Which made the more frustrating that he could not say what it was.

Outside the wind had picked up a little. Isaac sheltered his prize and walked quickly up the little alley that adjoined The Dying Child with Paddler Way and his workshop-home. He pushed open the green doors with his bum and backed into the building. Isaac's laboratory had been a factory and a warehouse years ago, and its huge, dusty floorspace swamped the little benches and retorts and blackboards that perched in its corners.

Of course you didn't volunteer the information, or even damn well admit it. But shit, Uther, I came to you and confronted you with what I'd worked out, and you Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Well, you're too professional to give away anything that could come back to bite you, but if you'd wanted to mislead me or leave me thinking I was wrong you could have.

There was such noise. It came without remorse. There were always people everywhere. New Crobuzon.

prison of Peter and Paul

At the social/political/ juridical, etc., level, the organizing principle was less to do with games and more to do with the nature of taboos—enormously powerful, often enormously arbitrary, and (crucially) regularly quietly broken, without undermining the fact of the taboo itself. That last element, I think, is sometimes underestimated in the discussions of cultural norms, where they are both asserted and breached. Both those elements are foundational. — author interview

This was the first time any adult had hit me. The window-cleaner winced with every strike. I felt better and worse that even a man such as he counted this punishment unfair. He did not intervene.

prickling of the skin, sixth and seventh senses ringing dully like psychic tinnitus.

Stated most simply, New Death is the condition whereby human corpses now lie always on a horizontal vector—no matter the angle of the surface or the substance of the matter below them—and now orient so that their feet are facing all observers, all the time.

and then the other op-er-at-or told the formal in-stee-gay-tor that his suit could not be heard the very

This is called data mining." She said the last words in English. "Which of us is the canary?

A rage. Ori supposed there were as many unspeakable stories as there were men come back from war. Baron was

I mean I know some of this lot are just villains, you know, just bad boys, but it all comes down to the god stuff in the end.

Everything, though, depended on whether we could teach the Ariekei what we had to.