Quotes from China Mieville

I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.

So...I'm the funny one? I'm the funny sidekick ? . . . That's no way to talk about anyone! To say they're just hangers-on to someone more important .

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

I do not dream , der Grimnebulin. I am a calculating machine that has calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neuroses, no hidden depths. My consciousness is a growing function of my processing power, not the baroque thing that sprouts from your mind, with its hidden rooms in attics and cellars.

He knows religion is bollocks," Collingswood said. "He just wishes he didn't.

The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That's concrete individuality: an individuality that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.

Do please," said Captain Naphi, "expedite this journey relevance-ward.

I needed to be alone for whatever would happen. I knew that something would as certainly as if this were a last chapter.

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.

She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.

When the rich grow afraid, they get nasty.

Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.

Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.

Remember the movements that don't look like moving.

Yeah, but where's the skill in being a hero if you were always destined to do it?

New Crobuzon was a city unconvinced by gravity.

Heaven might not be what everyone thinks it is, but that don't mean it's a myth.

We would never call inexplicable little insights 'hunches,' for fear of drawing the universe's attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang.

Were you terrified, Murgatroyd?" Murgatroyd nodded eagerly. "There you go, girl: You're a terrorist. You make me twitchy, and under Article Forty-One of the 2000 Terrorism Bill, that's all I need. Time for some reasonable force, I think.

Imagine if one of them were turned. Imagine if one could be bought.' 'But they're chosen just so's they can't be bought...' 'History...' Jacobs spoke with terse authority. Brought Ori to a hush. 'Is all full. And dripping. With the corpses . Of them who trusted the incorruptible .

Art Nouveau was coil-envy.

There were times, Sham felt, when the captains regretted there being only two types of limb they could lose to their obsessions.

A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins. It has been given many names. Each inlet and bay and stream has been classified as if it were discrete. But it is one thing, where borders are absurd. It fills the space between stones and sand, curling around coastlines and filling trenches between the continents.

Fortune-telling was quantum betting, a competitive scrying of variably likely outcomes.