Quotes from China Mieville

Termagant!" he moaned after her. "Shrew! Harridan! All right, all right, you win, you, you . . . uh . . . virago, you spitfire . . ." He rubbed his head and sat up, grinned sheepishly. Lin made an obscene gesture at him without turning around.

In the post-blast miasma, all Parisians grew invisible organs that flex in the presence of the marvelous.

Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.

A haggard man used one of the huts as a home. He lay on a sagging mattress, his head on his pack, surrounded by rubbish - paper, porcelain shards, food remains and unidentifiable debris. His hand was over his eyes. He looked like a failed soldier. Dirt seemed so worked into him that the lines of his face were like writing.

He knows religion is bollocks," Collingswood said. "He just wishes he didn't. That's why he understands the nutters. That's why he hunts them. He misses pure faith. He's jealous.

In the fecund shock-waves of the explosion, it was not only the Surrealists' own dreams that had manifested. Born with them were symbols from Symbolism and Decadence, imaginings of the surrealists' ancestors and beloveds, ghosts from their proto-canon.

No existe nada igual en ningún sitio -dijo -. En ningún sitio. No se trata de los sonidos. No es en los sonidos donde vive el significado.

Objects foraged out of Nazis' quarantine, fenced for colossal sums in the black markets of the world outside. Manifs stolen while the partisans fight for liberation, while Thibaut and his comrades face down devils and fascists and errant art, and die.

Ilse Aichinger, "The Bound Man

utterly human moan started from him, and it grew and grew until it became a bird

The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing.

their tendency to dutifully follow a script written before they were born.

Oh, time," Dane said. "Time time time. Time's always a bit more fiddly than you reckon.

And I who months before had run into town screaming my accusation was shy to say it now that I was asked to put it in clear words. I'd grown used to this world in which everyone knew what had happened or what I said had, in which it had gone from being spoken to being unspoken again, a secret everybody knew. Here I was, hesitating to speak it. I took persuading.

Sometimes I'd go to his house. If I had some cool cards in my pack of Iceberg Updates, we'd compare collections, maybe swap a few.

One moment it was a calculating machine, attempting dispassionately to keep up with the gouts of data. And then awash in those gouts, something metal twitched and a patter of valves sounded that had not been instructed by those numbers. A loop of data was self-generated by the analytical engine. The processor reflected on its creation in a hiss of high-pressure steam. One moment it was a calculating machine. The next, it thought.

Fights are much taxonomised. They have been subject over centuries to a complex, exhaustive categoric imperative. Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.

Mystery Epidemic of Imbecility.

I didn't tell the story to ask for help because I knew there was no help.

Lenin] wonders pugnaciously, however, whether a people 'influenced by the hopelessness of its situation' could be blamed for 'fling[ing] itself into a struggle that would offer it at least some chance of securing conditions for the further development of civilisation that were somewhat unusual'.

There behind the pigeon net, far higher than anyone could have reached, was painted in vivid yellow: ZANNA FOR EVER! "Cor. Someone else called Zanna," Deeba said. "Or you've got long arms. Or someone massive loves you, Zan.

Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not always be followed by night.

So there I am, wondering what to do, and I see you, and I see what you're carrying. And _that_ is why I came running after you. Because I do not believe in coincidence.

You told all this to the people in the town," he said. "They said they can't do anything because of no proof.