China Miéville quotes - page 4

Across the globe, in dark places of the earth, secret lairs were rarely caves of monsters or marvels but markets. Shops. The worst-kept secret in circulation was that certain activities invested items in their proximity with certain affects, effects, and powers, and made them hugely valuable. And that thus it was imperative that they be sold. That, certainly, had been the case for as long as there had been people and things, but there were always fluctuations. The occult economies of charged items were always jostling. (China Miéville)
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.
China Miéville
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.
China Miéville
It was an unusually hot afternoon. One of those days all slowly ambling bumblebees and honeysuckle and so forth, at which the English countryside, when it puts its mind to it, excels, and quite unlike any summer day anywhere else. Calm and still and lovely, but never without a sense of something impending. The sort of day one misses even as one experiences it.
China Miéville
What if the chosen one misunderstands what he's been chosen for?
China Miéville
You didn't know, but not knowing is no excuse.
China Miéville
This was not the time for rage but for politics and strategy.
China Miéville
Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable.
China Miéville
There wasn't even any reasoning. Secrecy was just a bureaucrats' reflex.
China Miéville
What theology that would have been, a god self-worshipping, a drug addicted to itself.
China Miéville
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. (China Miéville)
I suppose there were other institutions in Embassytown where the dynamic of the quotidian sustained-some hospitals, perhaps some schools, perhaps houses where shiftparents most deeply loved the children. Whenever any society dies there must be heroes whose fightback is to not change.
China Miéville
I suspect there was a power struggle in the Embassy, that some would have tried, out of habit, without rationale, to wall up information. They didn't win.
China Miéville
A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don't look back, don't be each other's anchors, no nostalgia. I wasn't expecting any of them to return.
China Miéville
A lot of geeks are pale, bespectacled, wear dark clothing and don't get out much - the stereotype exists because it is very often true. I could pass for a non-geek but it would be inaccurate.
China Miéville
I don't like allegory.
China Miéville
The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism.
China Miéville
Now what are we looking at right here? What's bang in the middle? Some people think that's mathematics there. Fine. But if maths is the study that best allows you to think your way to the centre, what're the forces you're investigating? Maths is totally abstract, at one level, square roots of minus one and the like, but the world is nothing if not rigorously mathematical. So this is a way of looking at the world which unifies all the forces: mental, social, physical.
China Miéville
I don't want to be a simile anymore,” I said. "I want to be a metaphor.
China Miéville
But I prefer to think of it as a quantum Hugo and that Paolo Bacigalupi and I oscillate between between Hugo particle and wave form, this year. So it's properly science-fictional.
China Miéville
Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I'm not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap. (China Miéville)
Before the humans came, we didn't speak so much of certain things. Before the humans came, we didn't speak so much. Before the humans came, we didn't speak.
China Miéville
Ever since I was two, I've loved octopuses, monsters, abandoned buildings.
China Miéville
I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.
China Miéville
I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.
China Miéville