Quotes from China Mieville

In time, in time they tell me, I'll not feel so bad. I don't want time to heal me. There's a reason I'm like this. I want time to set me ugly and knotted with the loss of you, marking me. I won't smooth you away. I can't say goodbye.

That's defeatist talk. I'll cobble something together. A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.

Devils and Nazis don't work well together.

He was back in the water, not braving but frowning, synchronised swimming, not swimming but sinking, toward the godsquid he knew was there, tentacular fleshscape and the moon-sized eye that he never saw but knew, as if the core of the fucking planet was not searing metal but mollusc, as if what we fall toward when we fall, what the apple was heading for when Newton's head got in the way, was kraken.

Surrealism comes for us all, Thibaut thinks.

We could just turn our phones and computers off – but we don't. And we don't blame ourselves for our lack of self-control: we blame our technology for being too addictive.

In the beginning was each word of Language, sound isomorphic with some Real: not a thought, not really, only self-expressed worldness, speaking itself through the Ariekei. Language had always been redundant: it had only ever been the world. Now the Ariekei were learning to speak, and to think, and it hurt.

Language is the continuation of coercion by other means." "Bullshit. It's cooperation.

I share the streets with aimlessly moving scraps of paper and little whirlwinds of dust, with motes that pass like erratic thieves under eaves and through doors.

Era como volver a ser niña, aunque no lo fuera. No hay nada comparable a ser niño. Ser niño es solo ser. Después, cuando lo pensamos, lo convertimos en juventud.

Standing there on his new perch, Sham was overwhelmingly bored of feeling overwhelmed. The more he worked, he realized, the quicker he worked.

I don't want to be a simile anymore," I said. "I want to be a metaphor.

Was it that these particular occult streets had been made, then hidden? Their names leaked as traps in an elaborate double-bluff, so that no one could go except those who knew that such traps were actually destinations? Or were there really no streets there when the traps were set? Perhaps these cul-de-scas were residues, yawned into illicit existence when the atlases were drawn up by liars.

London was a graveyard haunted by dead faiths. A city and a landscape. A market laid on feudalisms. Gathering and hunting, little pockets of alterity, too, but most of all in the level Billy had come to live in a tilework of fiefdoms, theocratic duchies, zones and spheres of influences, over each of which some local despot, some criminal pope, sat watch. It was all who-knew-whom, gave access to what, greased which palms on what route to where.

It had acquired a name, Spatters, that reflected the desultory randomness of its outlines: the whole stinking shanty-town seemed to have dribbled like shit from the sky.

If the techs are on it we're fine, but Briamiv and his buddy could fuck up a full stop at the end of a sentence.

And even if you're right, the CIA paid millions of dollars to men trying to kill goats by staring at them," I said.

There is the heat, which clots the air around her and stops up her pores and her eyes and ears

Anxieties and controversies were now as clearly traceable through it as woodgrain through varnish.

The air was stained by shadows, a darkness burst by lightning like camera flashes.

He had since forever been working on a book called Uncanny Blossom. When Leon had told him, Billy had said, "I had no idea you were entering the Shit Title Olympics." "If you didn't swim in your sump of ignorance you'd know that title's designed to fuck with the French. Neither word's translatable into their ridiculous language.

I hoped the hunter would come. I imagined him pushing through the thickets in the foothills. I've thought of him like that often since, as if he's still out there, game in his sights, intending to check on me on his return.

Soon they'll be saying you're a girl ate what was given her .

Like some waterhole in the veldt, she though unclearly, where the weak and the strong and predatory drink together in a truce: the gazelle, the wildebeest, the mafadet, and the lion. All the possibilities lined up together in fucking harmony, and the winner, the strongest, the fact, the real, letting the others that have failed live, letting them all live. Pacifist and pathetic.