China Miéville Quotes

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.

Why wouldn’t the gods of the world be giant squid? What better beast? It wouldn’t take much to imagine those tentacles closing around the world, now would it?

That was why this congregation protected him. He was not just another saint. Billy was the preserver. Giant-squid John the Baptist. The shyness he saw in the Krakenists was devotion. It was awe.
“Oh for God’s sake,” he said.
The men and women stared. He could see them attempting exegesis on his outburst.

It should be illegal to be so much younger than me.

I know, I know," Moore said. "Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean something else?" Shook his head. "What an awfully arrogant thing. What if faiths are exactly what they are? And mean exactly what they say?

“I’m asking you all to have faith. Don’t be afraid. ‘How could it have gone?’ people have asked me. ‘Why aren’t the gods doing anything?’ Remember two things. The gods don’t owe us anything. That’s not why we worship. We worship because they’re gods. This is their universe, not ours. What they choose they choose and it’s not ours to know why.”
Christ, thought Billy, what a grim theology. It was a wonder they could keep anyone in the room, without the emotional quid pro quo of hope.

Folklore was self-generating.

He tried to grin but it did not go well.

It is more foolish and childish to assume there is a conspiracy, or that there is not?

She probably used proxies and a cleaner-upper online too, because there was bugger-all of interest in her cache." "You have no idea what you're saying, do you, boss?" "None at all. I had the techies write it all out phonetically for me.

There is no theology so desperate that you can’t find it.

Destiny's bunk," said the book. "That's why this lot aren't the Propheseers anymore." "From here on in," said Mortar, "we're the Order of Suggesters.

It had some allies. Believe me, there’s nothing so terrible that someone won’t support it.

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

Throw something away and you declare it obsolete.