China Miéville Quotes

London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.

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.

In the emptied remains of a foreign bank was a sports shop. Below posters of physically adept men was a glass-front cabinet and iron grille, behind which was a big chunk of stone…The London Stone. That old rock was always suspiciously near the centre of things. A chunk of the Millarium, the megalith-core from where the Romans measured distances…This had been the seat of sovereignty, and it cropped up throughout the city’s history if you knew where to look…the Stone was the heart, the heart was stone, and it beat from its various places, coming to rest at last here in an insalubrious sports shop between cricket equipment.

As far as I'm concerned, some of the best literature of the last hundred years has come out of the genre tradition and of course the best of it challenges expectations just as the best of literary fiction challenges those expectations. But it's not that genre fiction is any more a constraint than mimetic fiction. So I see myself very much as a genre writer. I love the fantastic genres. I see what I'm doing as a development of them but very much a part of them. I never feel that I'm leaving them behind. I try and be as experimental and avant-garde and stretching as I can be but I don't see that as turning my back on the genre at all. Genre has always been able to encompass that.

He was, after all, the scientist-outcast, the disreputable thinker who walked out of a lucrative teaching post to engage in experiments too outrageous and brilliant for the tiny minds who ran the university. What did he care for convention? He would sleep with whomever and whatever he liked, surely!

Throw something away and you declare it obsolete.

This was not the time for rage but for politics and strategy.

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.

It wasn’t a city anymore, it was a collection of broken places separated by war without politics or acquisition so not war at all really but something more pathological.

She knows most of this, to some extent, and she knows she’s depressed, but if knowing the problem was the solution, most patients wouldn’t need us at all.

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

Although we revolutionary socialists are always accused of being Utopian, nothing strikes me as more Utopian than the reformist belief that with a bit of tinkering and some good faith, we can systematically improve the world. You have to ask how many decades of broken promises and failed schemes it will take to disprove that hope. Marxism isn’t about saying you’ll get a perfect world: it’s about saying we can get a better world than this one, and it’s hard to imagine, no matter how many mistakes we make, that it could be much worse than the mass starvation, war, oppression, and exploitation we have now. In a world where 30,000 to 40,000 children die of malnutrition daily while grain ships are designed to dump food into the sea if the price dips too low, it’s worth the risk.

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.

The water here reflects the stars through a stinking rainbow of impurities, effluents and chymical slop, making it sluggish and unsettling. (Oh, to rise above this to not smell this filth this dirt this dung to not enter the city through this latrine but I must stop, I must, I cannot go on, I must.)

Judah knows the trow will be eradicated and their homes lost to history, but he will not be party to it, and he has tried to stand in its way.