Quotes from China Mieville

In Paris you had to be ready to fight art and the Hellish—not to mention Nazis—so they labored under weapons for all eventualities.

classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don't look back, don't be each other's anchors, no nostalgia.

What d'you know about making big shit little?

There are clear modern-day analogies to ragbags of the sanctimonious who are nebulously anguished at the iniquities of capitalism, but far more so at any thought of fundamental change.

He is unable to think in words. The shells begin once again to pound the water around him, to make it into a bloody broth of metal and the dead.

The night was without stars or horizon. The sea and sky bled ink into each other.

In time, in time they tell me, I'll not feel so bad. I don't want time to heal me. There's a reason I'm like this. I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won't smooth you away. I can't say good-bye.

The gods don't owe us anything. That's not why we worship. We worship because they're gods. This is their universe, not ours. What they choose they choose and it's not ours to know why.

The first couple of times she had come here, she had been sure that he changed overnight, that the shards of physiognomy that made up his whole reorganized when no one was looking. She became frightened of her commission. She wondered hysterically if it was like a task in a moral children's tale, if she was to be punished for some nebulous sin by striving to freeze in time a body in flux, forever too afraid to say anything, starting each day from the beginning all over again.

There is something in the Russia-ness of Russia that often seems to intoxicate. Again and again, discussions of the country's history, particularly those of non-Russians but sometimes those of Russians themselves, veer into romanticised essentialism, evocations of some supposed irreducible, ineffable Russian Spirit, with a black box at its heart. Not only uniquely sad but uniquely inscrutable, evasive of explanation: mnogostradalnaya, much-suffering Russia; Little Mother Russia.

I remembered those elements in Scile, the little opacities that had always been present, that I'd always been intrigued by, that now seemed to have come to constitute all of him.

Saul was going to kill Anansi. They both knew it. Saul was going to kill Anansi and Loplop and King Rat, and Saul was going to die, all in an effort to prove that he was not his rat-father's son.

There are no civilians in war, no firewalls between the blessedly ignorant and those intimately connected to networks, markets of crime and religiosity.

Walls and ceilings moved with ratcheting mechanical life like the offspring of chains and crabs.

Be a dilettante, a sciolist, a swindler … So long as you return me to the sky, Grimnebulin.

The difficulty is that it's bad form to talk about them brazenly, but once you're inducted it's also a good idea to learn as many rules for as many hands featuring as many cards in as many suits in as many games as you might ever play, just in case.

Everything, even the dirt, was poised.

Whenever any society dies there must be heroes whose fightback is to not change.

What you offering? You scratch my soul, you know, I'll scratch yours. Tit for tat, darling. So what you been in? We all like a bit of theology here, love, no need to be shy." He licked his lips. "Give us an afterlife, go on.

Just once," he said with abrupt savagery, "in a goddamn while, it would really be a pleasure if the goddamn world worked the way it's supposed to. I am tired of the universe being such a bloody aleatory frenzy all, the bloody, time.

The Romanovian method becomes one of appointing adventurer after incompetent after nonentity to grand offices of state. The liberals and the sharper-witted right grow ever more apoplectic.

A Kedis troika approached afterward, colourcells winking in their frills, and the shemale speaker thanked him in her curious diction, shaking his hand with her prehensile genitalia.

Into sleep's benthos and deeper. A slander that the deepest parts are lightless. There are moments of phosphor with animal movement. Somatic glimmers, and in the trench of sleep those lights were tiny dreams.

Your city institutions... Talking and talking of individuals... but crushing them in layers and hierarchies... until their choices might be between three kinds of squalor.