Quotes from China Mieville

The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing.

I know your job's to channel the bleeding divine, and when have I ever stood in your way? Aren't I the bloke puts "Do Not Disturb, Eschatology Being Revelationed" on your door? EH? But you're supposed to keep me in the loop, and turn up when I need you, and do me the sheer minimum modicum of salutage and whatnot, right?

Some midnight-of-all or other [apocalypse] was predicted every few days or nights. Most came to nothing, leaving relevant prophets cringing with a unique embarrassment as the sum rose. It was a very particular shame, that of now ex-worshippers avoiding each other's eyes in the unexpected aftermath of 'final' acts -- crimes, admissions, debaucheries and abandon.

Only humans dread. Dread is appropriate to nothing. It's the surplus of animal fear, it's never indicated, it's nothing but itself.

If I program 'ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it," Scile said. "If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it's only sound, and that's not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.

They are too stupid to fear. Vertigo is too complex for them.

A blast, an acceleration, the distillate, the spirit, the history, the weaponized soul of convulsive beauty went critical.

terrorism could not win once the real terror went.

In the streets of Un Lun Dun: a group of a girl, a half ghost, a talking book, a piece of rubbish, and two living words was unusual but not very.

These felt very much like last moments.

I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns.

And the continual non-up-turnance of so valuable a commodity as a giant squid—the thought of getting their alembics on which made the city's alchemists whine like dogs—was provoking more and more interest from London's repo-men and -women.

The choice not to have sex, not to be hurt. The choice not to risk pregnancy. And then... what if she had become pregnant? The choice not to abort? The choice not to have a child?

Rude creatures emit slime and phosphorescence and move with flickerings of unclear limbs. The logic of their forms derives from nightmares.

The poets and artists and philosophers, resistance activists, secret scouts and troublemakers, had become, as they must, soldiers. Now

So what's your alternative?" people say, as if that's logic. We don't have to have an alternative, that's not how critique works. We may do, and if we do, you're welcome, but if we don't that no more invalidates our hate for this, for what is, than does that of a serf for her lord, her flail-backed insistence that this must end, whether or not she accompanies it with a blueprint for free wage labor.

We are sick and tired of living in debt and slavery,' the Rakalovsk peasants had their chairperson write. 'We want space and light.

They hammered it with sometimes-guns, that violently assert the manchmal, this stuff, our everyday, against the always of the immer.

It's not just us keeping them apart. It's everyone in Beszel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We're only the last ditch: it's everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don't blink. That's why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn't work. So if you don't admit it, it does. But if you breach, even if it's not your fault, for more than the shortest time ... you can't come back from that.

None of us have to obey instructions. I consider my own existence proof of that. So much of life is cobbled together when plans go awry. That is often where happiness comes from.

At dawn a great shark mouth appears at the horizon smiling like a stupid angel and chewing silently on the sky.

If she were studying Orciny, and there might be excellent reasons to do so, she'd be doing her doctorate in Folklore or Anthropology or maybe Comp Lit. Granted, the edges of disciplines are getting vague. Also that Mahalia is one of a number of young archaeologists more interested in Foucault and Baudrillard than in Gordon Childe or in trowels.

It ain't that he's not interested in, like, persuasiveness, get me? He's interested in it. Like something in a jar.

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 recognizes 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.