Quotes from China Mieville

The early years of a Bes (and presumably an Ul Qoman) child are intense learnings of cues. We pick up styles of clothing, permissible colours, ways of walking and holding oneself, very fast. Before we were eight or so most of us could be trusted not to breach embarrassingly and illegally, though licence of course is granted children every moment they are in the street.

On the hill we used a different, vaguer calendar than the one I've since learned. The seasons ours described—summer, dimming, and winter—were suited to a different place: the mountain had two seasons at most.

I'm downstairs. Hurry up, come on. Someone sent a bomb.

Isaac could see how the feathers of the face were shoved ruthlessly into the skin, doubtless bonded subcutaneously to make removal too agonizing to consider. He imagined the process of insertion, one by torturing one.

My father didn't look at me. He dropped more stones upon a random-looking cairn. The townspeople were slow to get out of our sight. He waited and watched them and didn't look at me and kept adding to the substance of the hill with the substance of the hill.

He was cheered by this. He was a scientist, not a mystic.

What was the point of dedicating your life to giving warnings if everyone who might have listened—because the majority were still unbothered and would possibly remain so till the sun went out—merely nodded and agreed?

Lenin turned to page 2 of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. There, a short report informed of a revolution in Petrograd. Lenin, too, looked u in thought, his eyes wide.

I didn't move: I had no moving left in me.

The costumes raised memories of the Night of the Kinken Shards, when the New Quill Party had overrun the khepri ghetto in a storm of murder, shattering spit-sculptures in the Plaza of Statues, stamping the mindless males and butchering the women until they trod a ground of glass needles, ichor, blood.

His dad was in the UQ Navy," he said to me. "Got tinnitus or some shit in a fucking idiot's skirmish with a Bes? tugboat over some disputed lobster pots or whatever.

I took the goats downslope a bit and they screamed at each other and I screamed too to see what it was like.

Tutte le note erano come a strati, un palinsesto di interpretazione in progresso. Feci archeologia.

As autom, Ehrsul had neither rights nor tasks, but so far as it was understood an owner, a settler of some previous generation, had died intestate, and she'd never become anyone else's property. There were variants of salvage laws by which someone might theoretically have tried to claim her, but by now it would have seemed abominable.

Godspit and shit, Jack, don't start with 'the limits of individual action' right now. I'm just tired. Sometimes, don't you sometimes wish you didn't care? I mean course you want a change, we want a change, but if a change ain't godsdamn coming, then the next thing I wish is that I didn't care." Fishday

I was bad at money but had amassed some. I couldn't claim that marriage was my real skill, but I was better at it than many. I'd had two previous husbands and a wife. I'd lost them to changes of predilection, without rancour—as I say, I wasn't bad at marriage. Scile was my fourth spouse.

An everyday Doomsayer in sandwich board abruptly walked away from what, over the last several days, had been his pitch, by the gates of a museum. The sign on his front was an oldschool Prophecy of the End. The one bobbing on his back read 'forget it.

What had touched me sent me not into mindless silence but into a dream arena, where I was quarry.

I CHECKED MY WATCH and glanced at the sky, which seemed resistant to morning.

The Canadians had Terrell. He was uninfected, in quarantine, and knew nothing.

Sometimes, don't you sometimes wish you didn't care? I mean course you want a change, we want a change, but if a change ain't godsdamn coming, then the next thing I wish is that I didn't care.

What you up to, Isaac? They're so egalitarian . . . well . . . Their society's all based on maximizing choice for the individual, which is why they're communistic. Grants the most uninhibited choice to everyone. And as far as I remember the only crime they have is depriving another garuda of choice. And then it's exacerbated or mollified depending on whether they do it with or without respect, which they absolutely love . . .

It is a jungle where hierarchies of infinities tower like prehistoric beasts.

He hurled another vast pot of unstable thaumaturgic compound at the militia. It fell short, but burst with such violence that it splashed onto and over the shields, mixing with the distillate and sending two officers screaming to the floor as their skin became parchment and their blood ink.