Quotes by China Miéville

If I program ’ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it,” Scile said. “If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it’s only sound, and that’s not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.

I think its important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books

Sometimes translation stops you understanding.

We speak now or I do, and others do. Youve never spoken before. You will. Youll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns.You have never spoken before.

These felt very much like last moments.

You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you wont be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.

Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.

Heaven might not be what everyone thinks it is, but that don’t mean it’s a myth.

Being a child is like nothing. Its only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

The choice not to have sex, not to be hurt. The choice not to risk pregnancy. And then... what if she had become pregnant? The choice not to abort? The choice not to have a child?

Saul was going to kill Anansi.They both knew it. Saul was going to kill Anansi and Loplop and King Rat, and Saul was going to die, all in an effort to prove that he was not his rat-fathers son.

Shadows fell on them like predators as the light went out.

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.

A few mad exaggerations, alright, within a couple of days: swear to fucking god, they were like throwing grenades and pulling out all kinds of crazy knackery, it was out of control. Whatever. As if the story, if big enough, reflected glory on the teller.

How do you...? What is it youre doing? he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutitive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense.Vardy even smiled. Paranoid, he said. Theology.

I needed to be alone for whatever would happen. I knew that something would as certainly as if this were a last chapter.

Id never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldnt see how that wasnt cowardice...

Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldnt say their didnt shore it up with footnotes and research.

So what’s your alternative?” people say, as if that’s logic. We don’t have to have an alternative, that’s not how critique works. We may do, and if we do, you’re welcome, but if we don’t that no more invalidates our hate for this, for what is, than does that of a serf for her lord, her flail-backed insistence that this must end, whether or not she accompanies it with a blueprint for free wage labor.

A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.