Quotes from China Mieville

Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn't say their didn't shore it up with footnotes and research.

The moon made horns, the sky was gnarly. The cults were skittish.

He struggled to overcome his vertigo; he made it something else. No less awe, but less fear. He took what was like fear in him, and made it humility. I'm damn small, he thought, hanging like a mote of dust in still air, in a sea that's damn big. But that's alright. I can do that.

where the two cities are close up they make for interference patterns, harder to read or predict. They are more than a city and a city; that is elementary urban arithmetic.

Of all the skills necessary for her work, what she was perhaps worst at was being polite to inanimate things.

Everything's fit to be worshipped.

he had known that the endless space below him that stretched out like a maw was exactly that: a mouth the size of the world, straining to swallow him.

Your job is to get villains. Right? You'll have to know what to do. If you don't know, you have to find out. If you can't find out you bloody well make it up and then you make it so.

You've met our guards." He gestured at the silent cylindrical guide. "The secret warriors: the binja.

When he had first started at the center, he had liked to think that he was unexpectedly cool-looking for such a job. Now he knew that he surprised no one, that no one expected scientists to look like scientists anymore.

Volunteering's an early and strong indication that you're not suited," he said.

Bellis gasped. Everywhere lights where suspended. Globes of cold illumination like frost moons, with no trace of the sepia of the New Crobuzon's gaslamps. The city glowed in the darkening water like a net full of ghostly lights. The outer edges of the city were low buildings in porous stone and coral.

How do you...? What is it you're doing?" he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutitive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense. Vardy even smiled. "Paranoid," he said. "Theology.

Strictly speaking, she thought, this place was a cross between a forest and a jungle. "This is a jorest," she said to Hemi. "Yeah," he said. "No, it's a fungle." They grinned.

Young mudlarks searching the river quag for scrap had been known to step into some discoloured patch of mud and start speaking long-dead languages, or find locusts in their hair, or fade slowly to translucency and disappear.

Lists make magic, the rhythm of itemised words: you do not list ten techniques, numbered and chantable, in austere prose appropriate for some early-millennium rebooted Book of Thoth, and not know that you have written an incantation.

I mean course you want a change, we want a change, but if a change ain't godsdamn coming, then the next thing I wish is that I didn't care.

Come on then," Deeba said. "We haven't got time to waste. You're not the ones who are going to get forgot in a few days' time if you don't phone home.

With the city like this, don't we have greater needs than poetry?

My job is not to try to give readers what they want, but to try to make readers want what I give.

We are all philosophers here where I am, and we debate among many other things the question of where it is that we live. On that issue I am a liberal. I live in the interstice yes, but I live in both the city and the city.

UnLondon would have to look after itself. She wasn't the Shwazzy. She was just someone. How could just someone be any help, whatever was going on?

In August 1914, the name of St Petersburg itself is changed to the more Slavonic Petrograd: in semiotic rebellion against this idiocy, the local Bolsheviks continue to style themselves the 'Petersburg Committee'.

The bullets are gun-eggs," Collingswood said to Baron, looking at Vardy. Farmers squeezing their holy metal beasts to percussive climax, fertilisation by cordite expulsion, violent ovipositors. Seeking warm places full of nutrients, protecting baby guns deep in the bone cages, until they hatched.