China Miéville quotes - page 2

Everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me. (China Miéville)
Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me. View quote
China Miéville
London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness. View quote
China Miéville
I always felt sorry for the sidekick as a kid. They never got their due and it left a very bad taste in the mouth - they are defined by a subordinate relationship to someone else. I always felt like a bit of sidekick when I was a kid and it didn't feel fair. View quote
China Miéville
A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul. View quote
China Miéville
I think science fiction is very bad at prediction. View quote
China Miéville
The dead are way more organized than the living. View quote
China Miéville
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. View quote
China Miéville
Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote. View quote
China Miéville
My Google-fu is strong. View quote
China Miéville
The other, more nebulous, but very strong influence of RPGs was the weird fetish for systematization, the way everything is reduced to "game stats.” If you take something like Cthulhu in Lovecraft, for example, it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu's "strength,” "dexterity,” and so on, carefully expressed numerically. There's something superheroically banalifying about that approach to the fantastic. On one level it misses the point entirely, but I must admit it appeals to me in its application of some weirdly misplaced rigor onto the fantastic: it's a kind of exaggeratedly precise approach to secondary world creation. (China Miéville)
Ori supposed there were as many unspeakable stories as there were men come back from war. View quote
China Miéville
She shouted, "Arms and tongues, Spiral?” and waggled her arms and stuck out her tongue, and the old man crowed and did the same. "He's for the first, against the second, as I recall,” she said to Ori. "Has he chanted for you? ‘Too much yammer, not enough hammer.'”. View quote
China Miéville
It had some allies. Believe me, there's nothing so terrible that someone won't support it. View quote
China Miéville
He tried to grin but it did not go well. View quote
China Miéville
A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge. View quote
China Miéville
Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird. View quote
China Miéville
People have wanted to narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There'll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights. View quote
China Miéville
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. View quote
China Miéville
Throw something away and you declare it obsolete. View quote
China Miéville
Andrej's mind, like any sane human's ... was a constantly convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness, the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole. (China Miéville)
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. View quote
China Miéville
She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care. View quote
China Miéville
The chief was a thuggish man: nervous, Cutter saw, because he knew he was a mediocrity become by kink of history a ruler. View quote
China Miéville
When the rich grow afraid, they get nasty. We say: A government for need not greed! View quote
China Miéville