China Miéville Quotes

Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.

Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.

Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.

Art is something you choose to make... it's a bringing together of... of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.

A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.

The dead are way more organized than the living.

A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.

We should have just killed him, that's a lesson, don't get creative with revenge

My Google-fu is strong.

The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments.

It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

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.

Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.

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

She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.

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

You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.

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

The unwritten novel has a basilisk’s stare.

A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?

But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse.

I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice...

I needed to be alone for whatever would happen. I knew that something would as certainly as if this were a last chapter.

Shadows fell on them like predators as the light went out.

Saul was going to kill Anansi.They both knew it. Saul was going to kill Anansi and Loplop and King Rat, and Saul was going to die, all in an effort to prove that he was not his rat-father's son.

Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

Heaven might not be what everyone thinks it is, but that don’t mean it’s a myth.

You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won't be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.

These felt very much like last moments.

Sometimes translation stops you understanding.

I think it's important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books

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

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

Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.

History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered.