Quotes from China Mieville

History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered.

In the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.

As he got older, Billy suspected, he would, Dicaprio-like, simply become like an increasingly wizened child.

and Lublamai no longer thought of screaming but only of watching as those dark markings rolled and boiled in perfect symetry across the wings like clouds in a night sky above, in water below.

I can dig my claws into the rim of a building's crown and spread my arms and feel the buffets and gouts of boisterous air and I can close my eyes and remember, for a moment, what it is to fly.

But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse.

I don't generally publicly respond to reviews, no matter how wrong-headed or perspicacious I think them. Nine times out of ten, writers' responses to critics seem to me at best undignified.

Death isn't what it used to be

I certainly didn't mind possibly sending the reader to a dictionary once in a while, but I tried not to do it too often.

Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children.

Get back to work , he would tell himself sternly. There's a garuda to get airborne.

Believe me, there's nothing so terrible that someone won't support it.

Interstiality is a theme that is simultaneously genuinely interesting and potentially quite useful, and also a terrible cliché, so if you're going to use it, it helps to be at least respectfully skeptical about the wilder claims of its theoretical partisans, I think.

There are no telepaths in this universe, I think, but there are empathics, with languages so silent that they may as well be sharing thoughts.

The return to anywhere you last visited as a child is difficult, especially when it's a door. Your heart beats harder when you knock.

Is it dangerous? Hmm. Well, define 'dangerous.' Is a knife 'dangerous'? Is Russian roulette 'dangerous'? Is arsenic 'dangerous'? ...It really depends on your perspective.

But sometimes it ain't the strongest wins. And especially when the stronger thinks, because it's stronger, that it ain't got to try to fight.

That is not how it is for the Ariekei. Their language is organised noise, like all of ours are, but for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen.

I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society's usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level.

As an immerser I progressed to the ranks I aspired to—those that granted me a certain cachet and income while keeping me from fundamental responsibilities. This is what I excelled at: the life-technique of aggregated skill, luck, laziness and chutzpah that we call floaking.

A few mad exaggerations, alright, within a couple of days: swear to fucking god, they were like throwing grenades and pulling out all kinds of crazy knackery, it was out of control. Whatever. As if the story, if big enough, reflected glory on the teller.

Just her, three men, a fidgety pig and lawful intent.

They looked like people-shaped clay in the moments before God breathed out.

It is not they who have closed but I. I've cut myself away. I'm alone, and lonely. What frightens me is that I've not become lonely now, but have looked inside and seen that I was, already. How long has that been going on?