China Miéville Quotes

Smoke and grime built up in the air until the train seemed to ride on a smog tide. The sounds of industry increased. The train flew through clutches of vast, sparse chimneys like blasted trees as the train passed through Sunter.

Could you really feel the hand of destiny while pointing a Glock?

Neither dust nor light stirred. It was as if time had been bled dry and given up.

I have taken to foraging alone after nightfall when the city quiets and becomes introspective. I walk as an intruder on its solipsistic dream. I came by darkness, I live by darkness. The savage brightness of the desert is like some legend I heard a long time ago. My existence grows nocturnal. My beliefs change.

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

Art's 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.

There wasn’t even any reasoning. Secrecy was just a bureaucrats’ reflex.

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

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

For every action, there’s an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers—and one comes true.

Word got around. It does that. A city like London was always going to be a paradox, it’s so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes. All those alternative pathways to the official ones and to those that made Londoners proud: there’d be quite contrary tendencies.
There, there was no state worth shit, no sanctions but self-help, no homeostasis but that of violence. The specialist police dipped in, and were tolerated as a sect or offhandedly killed like the cack-handed anthropologists. “Oh, here we go, FSRC again,” wink wink stab stab.
Even absent a sovereign, things in London chugged on effectively. Might made right, and that was no moral precept but a statement of simple fact. It really was law, this law enforced by bouncers, bruisers and bounty hunters, venal suburban shoguns. Absolutely Fanny Adams to do with justice. Have your opinions about that, by all means—London had its social bandits—but that was fact.

There was no chance at all he would see her, in that labyrinth of dubious experiments, where the nature of the research made even the architecture untrustworthy.

Sweet smoke wafted over the crowd: khepri, mostly, but here and there other races, investigating the statues. They filled the square: fifteen-foot figures of animals and plants and monstrous creatures, some real and some that had never lived, fashioned in brightly coloured khepri-spit. They represented hours and hours of communal labour. [...] To Lin the statues represented dedication and community, and bankrupt imaginations falling back on cod-heroic grandiosity. This was why she lived and ate and spat her art alone.

To cross-love openly would be a quick route to pariah status, rather than the bad-boy chic he had assiduously courted. What scared him was not that the editors of the journals and the chairs of the conferences and the publishers would find out about Lin and him. What scared him was that he be seen not trying to hide it. If he went through the motions of a cover-up, they could not denounce him as beyond the pale.

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?