Quotes from China Mieville

Can living artwork die? Can it live before it dies?

But the powerful and respected party right, particularly Stalin, went so far in the direction of moderation as to support a merger of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks - the proposal of Irakli Tsereteli, the outstanding Menshevik intellect and orator, recently returned from Siberian exile and now in charge of the Petrograd Soviet.

I always stayed. I can't say I chose to stay as I felt quite without traction, without capacity to find myself or anything.

The postcode did not look quite regular. Some hush-hush Trystero carrier?

because of the systematic mental erasure that the settlers had undertaken.

The thing is," Deeba said, eyeing Mr. Speaker, "you could only make words do what you want if it was just you deciding what they mean. But it isn't. It's everyone else, too. Which means you might want to give them orders, but you aren't in control. No one is.

Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all.

Same weather over here as back home," I said.

He befouled where he was with where he had been.

When I think of my age I think in years, still, even after all this time and travel. It's bad form, and ship-life should have cured me of it. "Years?" one of my first officers shouted at me. "I don't give two shits about whatever your pisspot home's sidereal shenanigans are, I want to know how old you are.

I closed my eyes then but it was too dark to clearly see that vision that my body would conjure out of blood and the inside of skin when light hit it, but I'd seen it so often, examined it so carefully, that it wasn't hard for me to call to mind.

staggering out of Language, into language

Those created creations were treated like tools that talked, their sentience an annoying product of magic noise, by those little mortal demiurges who thought dominion a natural by-product of expertise or creation.

In North Pittman is a particularly striking theology. There, one church memorably teaches that if all the trains were to be still, together, for one moment, if there were no rails percussing the iron road, all human life would wink instantly out. Because such noises are the snoring, the sleep-breathing of a railsea world, & it is the rails that dream us. We do not dream the rails.

Spending time with most automa is like accompanying someone brutally cognitively damaged, but Ehrsul was a friend. "Come save me from the village idiots," she sometimes said to me after downloading updates alongside other automa.

Now then. Now then now then. What's all this, then?

Why's there a pharos here?" he said. "You don't put a lighthouse where no one's going to go. You put it somewhere dangerous where they have to go.

Is it more foolish and childish to assume there is a conspiracy, or that there is not?

There are a thousand ways of inhabiting it, but the aether, that in-between, is always what it is; and ghosts, spirits, the souls of lucid dreamers squeeze past each other in complex asomatic ecology. Who better to close in on Wati the bodiless subversive than bodiless forces of the law?

One in particular—the younger, named, he told us, Dahar Jaris, not the man Dhatt menaced, but a boy in a battered denim jacket with NoMeansNo written on the back in English print that made me suspect it was the name of a band, not a slogan—had a voice that was familiar.

Isaac liked the idea of an inter-aspectual entity so enamoured with knowledge that it just roamed from realm to realm in a bath, murmuring with interest at everything it came across.

New Crobuzon again. Unceasing, unstintingly itself. Warm that spring, gamy: the rivers were stinking. Noisy. Uninterrupted New Crobuzon.

You see what's going on," Dane said. Miserably he ran his hands over his head. "That is a picket line, and I am in trouble." "A picket? The cats and birds?" Dane nodded. "The familiars are on strike.

The Tattoo. You wouldn't say "charming" -- that was hardly the adjective, but something, there was something to him. If you were deep in self-hate but stained with ego enough that you needed your death-drive diluted, eager for muteness and quiet, your object-envy strong but not untouched by angst, you might succumb to the Tattoo's brutal enticement.