Quotes from China Mieville

The reading rooms were large and quiet. Their windows were filmed in dust and desiccated insects, and seemed to age the light falling across the communal tables and the volumes in scores of languages.

You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won't be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.

We have to establish our credentials as an explorocracy; so to survive and rule ourselves, we have to explore.

A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don't look back, don't be each other's anchors, no nostalgia.

Once I said to my father, 'Why do you want me?' I still think that's the bravest thing I've ever done.

A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?

There is no case," he told her. "There's a series of random and implausible crises that make no sense other than if you believe the most dramatic possible shit. And there's a dead girl at the end of it all.

She was Remade she was (Remade scum), he knew it, he saw it, and still he felt incessantly what was inside him, and he felt a great scab of habit and prejudice split from him, part from his skin where his homeland had inscribed him deep. [...]There was a caustic pain as he peeled off a clot of old life and exposed himself open and unsure to her, to new air. [...] His feelings welled out and bled together (their festering ceased) and they began to resolve, to heal in a new form, to scar.

Now the Ariekei were learning to speak, and to think, and it hurt.

I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is a fairy tale.

The light was going: some cloud cover arriving, as if summoned by drama.

Language is the continuation of coercion by other means.

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

From that historically brief quite opaque moment, came the chaos of our material history, an anarchy of chronology, of mismatched remnants that delighted and horrified investigators.

While yes we can both agree the sudden recovery of this footage smells not a little, and that we appear to be bits of tinfoil-on-string to some malevolent government kitten, yes yes yes but , Borlu, however they've come by this evidence, this is the correct decision .

Shadows fell on them like predators as the light went out.

We could take his gag away , thought Isaac, and he wouldn't scream . . . but then he might speak . . . He left the gag in place.

Virgina Woolf versus Edward Lear." "Christ Alive," said Billy. "Are those my only choices?" "I went for Lear," said Leon. "Partly out of fidelity to the letter L. Partly because given the choice between nonsense and boojy wittering you blatantly have to choose nonsense.

This is a Possible Letter. Until the last second, when I write your name beside that word "Dear," all those sheets and months ago, this is a Possible Letter, pregnant with potentiality. I am very powerful right now. I am all ready to mine the possibilities, make one of them fact.

You got to be worried when they're agreeing about anything," she said. "Prophets. That's the last bloody thing you want prophets to do.

There's something intrinsically radical about the fantastic aesthetic - starting from the premise that the impossible is true, attempting to undermine expectations.

Gods it's well done , she thought, bowing her head, acknowledging consummate work. She felt skeins of cause, effect, effort, and interaction tying around her. She felt things all coming together, pushing her into this place, at this time, having done this thing.

Well, sometimes," Dane said, "Just because someone uses something wrong doesn't mean it's useless.

The city's a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city were sutured into a third thing, a heartish city, and cities are heart-stained, and hearts are city-stained too.