Quotes from China Mieville

It would be absurd, a ridiculous myopia, to hold up October as a simple lens through which to view the struggles of today. But it has been a long century, a long dusk of spite and cruelty, the excrescence and essence of its time. Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all. It would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing that we can learn from the revolution. To deny that the sumerki of October can be ours, and that it need not always be followed by night.

A dark-windowed diesel train burst out of the building, close enough to make the bus shake. It helter-skeltered downward into the earth. "Where's it going?" Zanna said. "Crossing the Odd, to some of the other abcities," Jones said. "If you're brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn't, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless…It's a terminus.

Pipes filled with brine that spied on the inhabitants of buildings watching, listening, hunting. You might obscure the attention of the Londonmancers, with the complicity of a treacherous borough, with strikebreaking hexes strong enough: but nothing could stay hidden from an inquisitive sea.

Vessels knocked together for hour upon hour, like bones, like someone infinitely stupid and patient at the door of an empty house.

You'd have known that without being told if you let yourself think about it.

For the Right, strikes are both devilish and pathetic, have both terrible and absolutely no effects.

It had the side-to-side proportions of a small sitting room, but its floor was way below. Absurdly deep. Steps angled down. It was a shaft of roomness, shelved with books. Ladders dangled from the stacks. As the church's holdings grew, Billy thought, horizontal constraints required generations of kraken worshippers to dig for their library.

I have a rule: I prefer anyone who doesn't try to kill me to anyone who does. I'm funny that way.

Oh, bullshit," Wyatt said. I blinked. "This isn't one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals, one slip of the tongue or misuse of sacred cutlery, and bang, he's on the grill. Do you ever think how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretend to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops we said the wrong thing, but they're really all about how ridiculous natives overreact.

It was a very inexact apocalypse.

William Gibson told only half the story: like the future, the past is also here in the present, and just as unevenly distributed.

History . . ." Jacobs spoke with terse authority. Brought Ori to a hush. "Is all full. And dripping. With the corpses. Of them who trusted the incorruptible.

As Lichtenberg said of angels," he wrote in one of his last letters, "so I say of dust. If they, or it, ever could speak to us, why in God's name should we understand?

Guv," she said to Baron. "What do you know about how to …" She opened and clenched her hands. "How to make big shit go into something little?

The revolutionaries want a new country in a new world, one they cannot see but believe they can build. And they believe that in so doing, the builders will also build themselves anew.

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

Chaverim," he said to them. A category stolen from an old language. "Chaver," they said back—comrade, equal, conspirator.

Where was that crisis energy in the real becoming what it was not, if what it was not was right there alongside what it was?

That's what gets converts these days," Baron said. "It's a buyers' market in apocalypse. What's hot in heresy's Armageddon.

Come on now," Vardy said. "You can have faith in anything," Vardy said. "Everything's fit to be worshipped.

Come on," said Billy. "This is batshit." He pleaded. "A religion about squid?

Oh for God's sake," he said. The men and women stared. He could see them attempting exegesis on his outburst.

Billy felt like a lid unsecured and banging in the wind.

I admit defeat. I've been trying to present these events with a structure. I simply don't know how everything happened. Perhaps because I didn't pay proper attention, perhaps because it wasn't a narrative, but for whatever reasons, it doesn't want to be what I want to make it.