Quotes by China Miéville

Were you terrified, Murgatroyd? Murgatroyd nodded eagerly. There you go, girl: Youre a terrorist. You make me twitchy, and under Article Forty-One of the 2000 Terrorism Bill, thats all I need. Time for some reasonable force, I think.

We should have just killed him, thats a lesson, dont get creative with revenge

I closed my eyes then but it was too dark to clearly see that vision that my body would conjure out of blood and the inside of skin when light hit it, but Id seen it so often, examined it so carefully, that it wasnt hard for me to call to mind.

The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. Thats concrete individuality: an individuality that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.

A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?

The unwritten novel has a basilisk’s stare.

Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children.

He was back in the water, not braving but frowning, synchronised swimming, not swimming but sinking, toward the godsquid he knew was there, tentacular fleshscape and the moon-sized eye that he never saw but knew, as if the core of the fucking planet was not searing metal but mollusc, as if what we fall toward when we fall, what the apple was heading for when Newtons head got in the way, was kraken.

In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.

A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.It has been given many names. Each inlet and bay and stream has been classified as if it were discrete. But it is one thing, where borders are absurd. It fills the space between stones and sand, curling around coastlines and filling trenches between the continents.

The sea is full of saints. You know that? You know that: youre a big boy. The seas full of saints and its been full of saints for years. Since longer than anything. Saints were there before there were even gods. They were waiting for them, and theyre still there now.Saints eat fish and shellfish. Some of them catch jellyfish and some of them eat rubbish. Some saints eat anything they can find. They hide under rocks; they turn themselves inside out: they spit up spirals. Theres nothing saints dont do. Make this shape with your hands. Like that. Move your fingers. There, you made a saint. Look out, here come another one! Now theyre fighting! Yours won.There arent any big corkscrew saints anymore, but there are still ones like sacks and ones like coils, and ones like robes with flapping sleeves. Whats your favourite saint? Ill tell you mine. But wait a minute, first, do you know what it is makes them all saints? Theyre all a holy family, theyre all cousins. Of each other, and of ... you know what else theyre cousins of?Thats right. Of gods.Alright now. Who was it made you? You know what to say.Who made you?

My Google-fu is strong.

For the Right, strikes are both devilish and pathetic, have both terrible and absolutely no effects.

She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.

The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments.

Thats what gets converts these days, Baron said. Its a buyers market in apocalypse. Whats hot in heresys Armageddon.

A trap is only a trap if you dont know about it. If you know about it, its a challenge.

Youd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.

There’s a big default notion that “spare,” or “precise” prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it’s in no way intrinsically more accurate, more relevant, or better than lush prose. That adjective “precise,” for example, needs unpicking. If a “minimalist” writer describes a table, and a metaphor-ridden adjective-heavy weird fictioneer describes a table, they are very different, but the former is in absolutely no way closer to the material reality than the latter. Both of them are radically different from that reality. They’re just words. A table is a big wooden thing with my tea on it.

But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse.