Top 100 China Mieville Quotes
#1. Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
China Mieville
#2. I have a rule: I prefer anyone who doesn't try to kill me to anyone who does. I'm funny that way.
China Mieville
#3. You'd have known that without being told if you let yourself think about it.
China Mieville
#4. The Canadians had Terrell. He was uninfected, in quarantine, and knew nothing.
China Mieville
#5. History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered.
China Mieville
#6. Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.
China Mieville
#7. The moon made horns, the sky was gnarly. The cults were skittish.
China Mieville
#8. Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.
China Mieville
#9. 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.
China Mieville
#10. At dawn a great shark mouth appears at the horizon smiling like a stupid angel and chewing silently on the sky. Women
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#11. Any moment called now is always full of possibles.
China Mieville
#12. A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don't look back, don't be each other's anchors, no nostalgia.
China Mieville
#13. Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.
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#14. The reading rooms were large and quiet. Their windows were filmed in dust and desiccated insects, and seemed to age the light falling across the communal tables and the volumes in scores of languages.
China Mieville
#15. Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.
China Mieville
#16. Why's there a pharos here?" he said. "You don't put a lighthouse where no one's going to go. You put it somewhere dangerous where they have to go.
China Mieville
#17. 'Kraken' is a very undisciplined book. That's a gamble. If it doesn't come off, it's disastrous. But there are pleasures, I think, to a meandering lack of discipline that you can't get the other way, and vice versa.
China Mieville
#18. Those created creations were treated like tools that talked, their sentience an annoying product of magic noise, by those little mortal demiurges who thought dominion a natural by-product of expertise or creation.
China Mieville
#19. I don't generally publicly respond to
reviews, no matter how wrong-headed or perspicacious I think them. Nine times out of ten, writers' responses to critics seem to me at best undignified.
China Mieville
#20. 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.
China Mieville
#21. Is it dangerous? Hmm. Well, define 'dangerous.' Is a knife 'dangerous'? Is Russian roulette 'dangerous'? Is arsenic 'dangerous'? ... It really depends on your perspective.
China Mieville
#22. He hurled another vast pot of unstable thaumaturgic compound at the militia. It fell short, but burst with such violence that it splashed onto and over the shields, mixing with the distillate and sending two officers screaming to the floor as their skin became parchment and their blood ink.
China Mieville
#23. 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.
China Mieville
#25. Into sleep's benthos and deeper. A slander that the deepest parts are lightless. There are moments of phosphor with animal movement. Somatic glimmers, and in the trench of sleep those lights were tiny dreams.
China Mieville
#26. The aim of a PhD's to ensure that no one, including your advisor, understands what you're doing after the first couple of years.
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#28. I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.
China Mieville
#29. They are too stupid to fear. Vertigo is too complex for them.
China Mieville
#31. And Lublamai no longer thought of screaming but only of watching as those dark markings rolled and boiled in perfect symetry across the wings like clouds in a night sky above, in water below.
China Mieville
#32. Remember the movements that don't look like moving.
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#34. It had not been a long journey, but the memory of it filled her like an infection. She had felt tethered by time to the city behind her, so that the minutes stretched out taut as she moved away, and slowed the farther she got, dragging out her little voyage.
China Mieville
#35. He said, You'll write it not because there's no possibility it'll be found but because it costs too much to not write it.
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#36. You got to be worried when they're agreeing about anything," she said. "Prophets. That's the last bloody thing you want prophets to do.
China Mieville
#37. Hello slash query is all well? parenthesis enquiry after suitability of timing slash insinuations of warmness sixty percent insinuations of belief that interlocutor has topic to be discussed forty percent blah blah." I raised an eyebrow. "It was pointless.
China Mieville
#38. ... 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.
China Mieville
#39. I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.
China Mieville
#40. Termagant!" he moaned after her. "Shrew! Harridan! All right, all right, you win, you, you ... uh ... virago, you spitfire ... " He rubbed his head and sat up, grinned sheepishly. Lin made an obscene gesture at him without turning around.
China Mieville
#42. 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.
China Mieville
#43. 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.
China Mieville
#45. Its surface sheened with saft that evaporated out from its crystal shielding in threads that degraded to nothing.
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#46. You've met our guards." He gestured at the silent cylindrical guide. "The secret warriors: the binja.
China Mieville
#47. I can dig my claws into the rim of a building's crown and spread my arms and feel the buffets and gouts of boisterous air and I can close my eyes and remember, for a moment, what it is to fly.
China Mieville
#48. 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.
China Mieville
#50. Isaac liked the idea of an inter-aspectual entity so enamored with knowledge that it just roamed from realm to realm in a bath, murmuring with interest at everything it came across.
China Mieville
#51. 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.
China Mieville
#52. Tell me," Bren said. "I thought you'd despaired."
"I did, too."
"What then? Tell me."
I told him. Revelation was spoiled for him, but I can retain it here, for you.
China Mieville
#55. I wish that there was nothing to hold me here, that gravity was a suggestion I could ignore.
China Mieville
#56. Collingswood frowned at the clouds, like she did not like what they wrote.
China Mieville
#58. My dad hates umbrellas, said Deeba, swinging her own. When it rains he always says the same thing. 'I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society's usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level.
China Mieville
#59. The Weaver is a really godlike power. It's not even a blind idiot god, a sort of Lovecraft thing, it's just a purely capricious god. It's an intelligence you can't understand, so you can't trust it."
China Mieville
#60. Geeks run the world. Condoleezza Rice is a geek, Bill Gates is clearly a geek, many of the big filmmakers and writers are geeks, lots of military people are geeks. Anyone who has heard Donald Rumsfeld talk about military hardware knows they are in the presence of a geek.
China Mieville
#61. A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.
China Mieville
#62. I closed my eyes then but it was too dark to clearly see that vision that my body would conjure out of blood and the inside of skin when light hit it, but I'd seen it so often, examined it so carefully, that it wasn't hard for me to call to mind.
China Mieville
#63. I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is a fairy tale.
China Mieville
#64. The air was stained by shadows, a darkness burst by lightning like camera flashes.
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#65. While yes we can both agree the sudden recovery of this footage smells not a little, and that we appear to be bits of tinfoil-on-string to some malevolent government kitten, yes yes yes but, Borlu, however they've come by this evidence, this is the correct decision.
China Mieville
#66. You can't see the future, there's no such thing. It's all bets. You'll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn't mean either of them's wrong.
China Mieville
#67. A Kedis troika approached afterward, colourcells winking in their frills, and the shemale speaker thanked him in her curious diction, shaking his hand with her prehensile genitalia.
China Mieville
#68. Either way, it is a curio of the moment that hard-left advocates of 'all power to the soviets' were delegated by a soviet opponent to defend the Soviet currently arguing furiously against taking the power they wanted it to take. Those
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#69. Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I'm not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap.
China Mieville
#70. So long as it fated, fate didn't care what it fated.
China Mieville
#71. Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.
China Mieville
#72. Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.
China Mieville
#73. A blast, an acceleration, the distillate, the spirit, the history, the weaponized soul of convulsive beauty went critical.
China Mieville
#74. Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction - and it doesn't get the attention it deserves from the literati.
China Mieville
#75. The poets and artists and philosophers, resistance activists, secret scouts and troublemakers, had become, as they must, soldiers. Now,
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#76. 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.
China Mieville
#77. Anxieties and controversies were now as clearly traceable through it as woodgrain through varnish.
China Mieville
#78. 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.
China Mieville
#79. A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.
China Mieville
#80. 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.
China Mieville
#82. His Infernal Excellency," he declared, "the ambassador of Hell.
China Mieville
#83. People have wanted to narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There'll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights.
China Mieville
#84. With the city like this, don't we have greater needs than poetry?
China Mieville
#87. Now the Ariekei were learning to speak, and to think, and it hurt.
China Mieville
#89. 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.
China Mieville
#90. That's what gets converts these days," Baron said. "It's a buyers' market in apocalypse. What's hot in heresy's Armageddon.
China Mieville
#92. Volunteering's an early and strong indication that you're not suited, he said.
China Mieville
#93. 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.
China Mieville
#94. Get back to work, he would tell himself sternly. There's a garuda to get airborne.
China Mieville
#95. They looked like people-shaped clay in the moments before God breathed out.
China Mieville
#96. 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 loss of you, marking me. I won't smooth you away.
I can't say goodbye.
China Mieville
#97. The one that goes: I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.
China Mieville
#98. I was bad at money but had amassed some. I couldn't claim that marriage was my real skill, but I was better at it than many. I'd had two previous husbands and a wife. I'd lost them to changes of predilection, without rancour - as I say, I wasn't bad at marriage. Scile was my fourth spouse.
China Mieville
#99. Were you terrified, Murgatroyd?" Murgatroyd nodded eagerly. "There you go, girl: You're a terrorist. You make me twitchy, and under Article Forty-One of the 2000 Terrorism Bill, that's all I need. Time for some reasonable force, I think.
China Mieville
#100. It is not they who have closed but I. I've cut myself away. I'm alone, and lonely. What frightens me is that I've not become lonely now, but have looked inside and seen that I was, already. How long has that been going on?
China Mieville
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