Quotes from China Mieville

Le lapidi erano banali, parevano chiedere scusa ai defunti.

Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

almanacs, or what was left of them when those pages making incorrect predictions and offering unhelpful advice had been torn out.

His manager taught him that words change with time, by single letters or more, sometimes their whole roots switching—a "y" to an "e" in a name for power, "sun-writing" becomes "light-drawing." The man eventually gave him this whole other tongue, and he revisited and at last learned from those cuttings about immense foreign wars.

He didn't know what if anything it was his mother got from his father's company.

Billy walked into a hall where though it was windowless there was not only light but shafts of it, ajut from the ceiling, each starting at a random point in the unbroken surface and crazy-pillaring down in random crosshatched directions, as if the room were nostalgic for moonbeams it had never seen and grew its own simulacra. He walked through and under those interlaced fat fingers of imagined light toward a waiting thing.

Houses built on bridges are scandals. A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape

I wanted to do a book that was extremely suspicious of storytelling... it ("Embassytown") is very skeptical of the liberating potential of narrative. [I present] the idea that narrative may just as well be a shackle as [well] as a key.

The one that goes: I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.

He thought then of what it would be. Of that moment when the dispossessed, the toilers, the, yes if she wanted, yes, the commonalty heard that the Mayor, the head of the Fat Sun, the arbiter of New Crobuzon, was gone. What that would be.

Liberation was fucked up.

The Ambassadors spoke to me in the language of our Hosts. They spoke me: they said me. They warned me that the literal translation of the simile would be inadequate and misleading. *There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a time.* 'It'll be shortened with use,' Bren told me. 'Soon they'll be saying you're a girl ate what was given her.

This gentleman is cactus," said Doul.

I paid it nuts, Billy. What would you think I'd pay a squirrel?

Either way, it is a curio of the moment that hard-left advocates of 'all power to the soviets' were delegated by a soviet opponent to defend the Soviet currently arguing furiously against taking the power they wanted it to take. Those

This first book's for everyone, though almost no one wants it or would know how to read it.

In 1964 a coalition of activists, technologists, and academics delivered "The Triple Revolution", an open memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson. The signatories pointed out that "wealth produced by machines… is still wealth", and used this to argue for more a equitable distribution of global profits.

He said, You'll write it not because there's no possibility it'll be found but because it costs too much to not write it.

If one death'll stop ten, ain't it better? If two deaths'll save a city?

Democracy' was a sociological term in Russia in 1917, denoting the masses, the lower class, at least as strongly as it did a political method. For many b those heady moments, Kerensky exemplified 'the democracy'.

My task is changed: not to uphold the law, or another law, but to maintain the skin that keeps law in place. Two laws in two places, in fact.

the second book's for readers, he said. But you can't know when they'll come, if they do. It's the book for telling: no code for that one. But—he counted one again and had my close attention—you can still use it to tell secrets and send messages. Even so. You could say them right out, but you can hide them in the words too, in their letters, in the ordering on lines, the arrangements and rhythms.

The assumption – and I think it's correct – is that the technology is going to happen anyway, so the best thing is to get it distributed as quickly as possible and see what people use it for, and keep an eye out for any problems that arise.

The unwritten novel has a basilisk's stare.