China Miéville Quotes

Metamorphosis is death. Inside a pupa larval flesh breaks down utterly, as if in chemical spill. Eyes do not become other eyes nor mouthparts mouths. All parts are lost in a reconfiguring slop, as absolutely formless as a salted slug, that ex liquid nihilo self-organizes into a quite other animal. A cocoon is not a transformation pod but an execution chamber, one that doubles as a birthplace, and is parsimonious with matter.

Folklore was self-generating.

Ori supposed there were as many unspeakable stories as there were men come back from war.

The winds of this city are a more melancholy breed. They explore like lost souls, looking in at dusty gaslit windows. We are brethren, the city-winds and I. We wander together.

Annalise’s fantasies involve disappearance. She catastrophizes all the time, and makes things worse than they need to be by doing so.

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

The thing about good pulp is that you trust the reader and you know that the mind is a machine to process metaphors so of course all those connections will be there. But you've also granted the fantastic its own dynamic and allowed that awe. There's no contradiction. So I want to have monsters as a metaphor but I also want monsters because monsters are cool. There's no contradiction.

He planned his funeral, his oration, the invitations, the snubs, but that, death itself, was always Plan B. How, he would have said to his specialists, might we bypass this unpleasantness?

London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.

There are no cats in UnLondon, for example, because they’re not magic and mysterious at all, they’re idiots.

The sea. I bet you the sea might have ideas. Wouldn’t surprise me if the bastard ocean might have a little something to do with all this. Stands to reason, right? Taking back what’s its? Render unto sea, sir.

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 about how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretending to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops, we said the wrong thing, but they're really all about how ridiculous natives overreact." He laughed and shook his head. "Avice, we must have made thousands of fuckups like that over the years. Think about it. Just like our visitors did when they first met our lot, on Terre. And for the most part we didn't lose our shit, did we?

Moral your artistic proclivities are not, nor fitting for a physician, though I won’t deny the skill in them. They are, I will say it, unnatural.

The lamp was a beacon, a lighthouse in that forbidding city, steering the wyrman’s way over the river and out of the predatory night.

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