Quotes by China Miéville

Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.

The dead are way more organized than the living.

In time, in time they tell me, Ill not feel so bad. I dont want time to heal me. Theres a reason Im like this.I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I wont smooth you away.I cant say goodbye.

Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending theyre not absurd.

We would never call inexplicable little insights hunches, for fear of drawing the universes attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang.

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? Stop trying to make sense of it and just listen, Dane said.And what, Moore said, if a large part of the reason theyre so tenacious is that theyre perfectly accurate?

Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times theyre amiable and sometimes not.

The bullets are gun-eggs,” Collingswood said to Baron, looking at Vardy. Farmers squeezing their holy metal beasts to percussive climax, fertilisation by cordite expulsion, violent ovipositors. Seeking warm places full of nutrients, protecting baby guns deep in the bone cages, until they hatched.

Art is something you choose to make... its a bringing together of... of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.

Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror havent grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.

The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread thats only chance, failure, theyre like grubs that die without changing.

History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered.

If youre brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisnt, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless.

Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.

I just cant get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is a fairy tale.

In the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.

Houses built on bridges are scandals. A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but when her foot falls it meets the ground right on the other side. A bridge is just better than no bridge but its horizon is gaplessness, and the fact of itself should still shame it. But someone had built on this bridge, drawn attention to its matter and failure. An arrogance that thrilled me.

It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. Its only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

It is not they who have closed but I. Ive cut myself away. Im alone, and lonely. What frightens me is that Ive not become lonely now, but have looked inside and seen that I was, already. How long has that been going on?

Of all the skills necessary for her work, what she was perhaps worst at was being polite to inanimate things.