Top 100 Mieville Quotes
#1. What can we get on with while our consciousness rests? A researcher into the mind, a psychonomer , a thought-mapper , might claim this a meaningless question: that we are nothing without our consciousness.When it rests so do we
-Railsea by China Mieville
China Mieville
#2. Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
China Mieville
#3. 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
#4. But sometimes it ain't the strongest wins. And especially when the stronger thinks, because it's stronger, that it ain't got to try to fight.
China Mieville
#5. Gods it's well done, she thought, bowing her head, acknowledging consummate work. She felt skeins of cause, effect, effort, and interaction tying around her. She felt things all coming together, pushing her into this place, at this time, having done this thing.
China Mieville
#6. My parents went through the dictionary looking for a beautiful name, nearly called me Banyan, flicked on a few pages and came to China, which is cockney rhyming slang for mate.
China Mieville
#7. His fidelity to the cliche transcended the necessity to communicate.
China Mieville
#8. Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.
China Mieville
#9. You'd have known that without being told if you let yourself think about it.
China Mieville
#10. Every book I write, the first thing I have to do is get into the voice, and the voice varies from book to book - that's part of what's interesting to me.
China Mieville
#11. Officers looked at the antique once-animals that eyed them back, at the no giant tank, at the nowhere anything so big and missing as Architeuthis could be.
China Mieville
#12. The Canadians had Terrell. He was uninfected, in quarantine, and knew nothing.
China Mieville
#13. History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered.
China Mieville
#14. I have some gold. I will interest you. Pity me. I beg you to help me.
China Mieville
#15. The return to anywhere you last visited as a child is difficult, especially when it's a door. Your heart beats harder when you knock.
China Mieville
#16. No one ever got into science fiction for the sex or prestige. They got into it because they love it.
China Mieville
#17. Imagine if one of them were turned. Imagine if one could be bought.'
'But they're chosen just so's they can't be bought ... '
'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.
China Mieville
#18. 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
#19. This is kraken year zero," Moore said. "This is Anno Teuthis. We're in the end times. What d'you think's been going on?
China Mieville
#20. A few mad exaggerations, alright, within a couple of days: swear to fucking god, they were like throwing grenades and pulling out all kinds of crazy knackery, it was out of control. Whatever. As if the story, if big enough, reflected glory on the teller.
China Mieville
#21. Virgina Woolf versus Edward Lear."
"Christ Alive," said Billy. "Are those my only choices?"
"I went for Lear," said Leon. "Partly out of fidelity to the letter L. Partly because given the choice between nonsense and boojy wittering you blatantly have to choose nonsense.
China Mieville
#23. The moon made horns, the sky was gnarly. The cults were skittish.
China Mieville
#24. I feel fantastically geeky. [But] I'm not one of those people who's enormously proud of being a geek, but nor am I particularly ashamed of it.
China Mieville
#25. Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.
China Mieville
#26. Fortune-telling was quantum betting, a competitive scrying of variably likely outcomes.
China Mieville
#27. From that historically brief quite opaque moment, came the chaos of our material history, an anarchy of chronology, of mismatched remnants that delighted and horrified investigators.
China Mieville
#28. Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.
China Mieville
#29. He struggled to overcome his vertigo; he made it something else. No less awe, but less fear. He took what was like fear in him, and made it humility. I'm damn small, he thought, hanging like a mote of dust in still air, in a sea that's damn big. But that's alright. I can do that.
China Mieville
#30. In the field of fantastic fiction, the question of world-building is not uncontroversial. But I grew up with 'Dungeons and Dragons,' so that whole world-building thing is very close to my heart.
China Mieville
#31. 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
#32. Your job is to get villains. Right? You'll have to know what to do. If you don't know, you have to find out. If you can't find out you bloody well make it up and then you make it so.
China Mieville
#33. At dawn a great shark mouth appears at the horizon smiling like a stupid angel and chewing silently on the sky. Women
China Mieville
#34. Any moment called now is always full of possibles.
China Mieville
#35. I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.
China Mieville
#36. In the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.
China Mieville
#37. 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
#38. This is a Possible Letter. Until the last second, when I write your name beside that word "Dear," all
those sheets and months ago, this is a Possible Letter, pregnant with potentiality. I am very powerful
right now. I am all ready to mine the possibilities, make one of them fact.
China Mieville
#39. As an immerser I progressed to the ranks I aspired to - those that granted me a certain cachet and income while keeping me from fundamental responsibilities. This is what I excelled at: the life-technique of aggregated skill, luck, laziness and chutzpah that we call floaking.
China Mieville
#40. A sickly little smile grew and died on his mouth like a fungus.
China Mieville
#41. Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.
China Mieville
#42. 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
#43. The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.
China Mieville
#44. Where's the skill in being a hero if you were always destined to do it?
China Mieville
#45. 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.
China Mieville
#46. A city like London was always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes.
China Mieville
#47. Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.
China Mieville
#48. I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.
China Mieville
#49. Do please," said Captain Naphi, "expedite this journey relevance-ward.
China Mieville
#50. A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?
China Mieville
#51. There's something intrinsically radical about the fantastic aesthetic - starting from the premise that the impossible is true, attempting to undermine expectations.
China Mieville
#52. Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.
China Mieville
#53. I certainly didn't mind possibly sending the reader to a dictionary once in a while, but I tried not to do it too often.
China Mieville
#54. 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
#55. 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.
China Mieville
#56. We should have just killed him, that's a lesson, don't get creative with revenge
China Mieville
#57. '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
#58. I'll never be a minimalist. The fact that the prose is more tightly controlled doesn't for a minute mean that it's minimalist. I very much like arcane words and baroque sentence structure.
China Mieville
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. We could take his gag away, thought Isaac, and he wouldn't scream ... but then he might speak ... He left the gag in place.
China Mieville
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. It ain't that he's not interested in, like, persuasiveness, get me? He's interested in it. Like something in a jar.
China Mieville
#65. 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
#66. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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.
China Mieville
#70. She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.
China Mieville
#71. Once I said to my father, 'Why do you want me?'
I still think that's the bravest thing I've ever done.
China Mieville
#72. To take the choice of another ... to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to ... for all we individuals to have ... our choices.
China Mieville
#73. 'Kraken' is set in London and has a lot of London riffs, but I think it's more like slightly dreamlike, slightly abstract London. It's London as a kind of fantasy kingdom.
China Mieville
#75. I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.
China Mieville
#76. Sometimes I'd go to his house. If I had some cool cards in my pack of Iceberg Updates, we'd compare collections, maybe swap a few.
China Mieville
#77. They are too stupid to fear. Vertigo is too complex for them.
China Mieville
#79. A lot of geeks are pale, bespectacled, wear dark clothing and don't get out much - the stereotype exists because it is very often true. I could pass for a non-geek but it would be inaccurate.
China Mieville
#80. So ... I'm the funny one? I'm the funny sidekick?
.
.
.
That's no way to talk about anyone! To say they're just hangers-on to someone more important.
China Mieville
#81. Strictly speaking, she thought, this place was a cross between a forest and a jungle. "This is a jorest," she said to Hemi. "Yeah," he said. "No, it's a fungle." They grinned.
China Mieville
#82. Why should we not shep naches from the accomplishments of our machines? This vicarious joy or success sounds somewhat odd, but it shouldn't be. We get excited when our sports team wins a game; why should it disturb or disappoint us when our creations turn out to be more accomplished than ourselves?
China Mieville
#83. My job is not to try to give readers what they want, but to try to make readers want what I give.
China Mieville
#84. 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
#85. In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.
China Mieville
#86. Stated most simply, New Death is the condition whereby human corpses now lie always on a horizontal vector - no matter the angle of the surface or the substance of the matter below them - and now orient so that their feet are facing all observers, all the time.
China Mieville
#87. Remember the movements that don't look like moving.
China Mieville
#88. Vessels knocked together for hour upon hour, like bones, like someone infinitely stupid and patient at the door of an empty house.
China Mieville
#90. 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
#91. 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.
China Mieville
#92. 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
#93. The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough. It's escapist, but it can't escape.
China Mieville
#94. 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
#95. ... 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
#96. 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
#97. Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children.
China Mieville
#98. 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
#100. There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain.
China Mieville
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