231 Quotes by China Miéville

But the powerful and respected party right, particularly Stalin, went so far in the direction of moderation as to support a merger of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks - the proposal of Irakli Tsereteli, the outstanding Menshevik intellect and orator, recently returned from Siberian exile and now in charge of the Petrograd Soviet.

I don’t generally publicly respond toreviews, no matter how wrong-headed or perspicacious I think them. Nine times out of ten, writers’ responses to critics seem to me at best undignified.

In August 1914, the name of St Petersburg itself is changed to the more Slavonic Petrograd: in semiotic rebellion against this idiocy, the local Bolsheviks continue to style themselves the 'Petersburg Committee'.

Surrealism comes for us all, Thibaut thinks.

Once I said to my father, 'Why do you want me?'I still think that's the bravest thing I've ever done.

The revolutionaries want a new country in a new world, one they cannot see but believe they can build. And they believe that in so doing, the builders will also build themselves anew.

Billy walked into a hall where though it was windowless there was not only light but shafts of it, ajut from the ceiling, each starting at a random point in the unbroken surface and crazy-pillaring down in random crosshatched directions, as if the room were nostalgic for moonbeams it had never seen and grew its own simulacra. He walked through and under those interlaced fat fingers of imagined light toward a waiting thing.

Subby Subby Subby," whispered Goss. "Keep those little bells on your slippers as quiet as you can. Sparklehorse and Starpink have managed to creep out of Apple Palace past all the monkeyfish, but if we're silent as tiny goblins we can surprise them and then all frolic off together in the Meadow of Happy Kites.

The aim of a PhD's to ensure that no one, including your advisor, understands what you're doing after the first couple of years.