231 Quotes by China Miéville

He is unable to think in words. The shells begin once again to pound the water around him, to make it into a bloody broth of metal and the dead.

Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.

...If she were studying Orciny, and there might be excellent reasons to do so, she'd be doing her doctorate in Folklore or Anthropology or maybe Comp Lit. Granted, the edges of disciplines are getting vague. Also that Mahalia is one of a number of young archaeologists more interested in Foucault and Baudrillard than in Gordon Childe or in trowels.

Tutte le note erano come a strati, un palinsesto di interpretazione in progresso. Feci archeologia.

…where the two cities are close up they make for interference patterns, harder to read or predict. They are more than a city and a city; that is elementary urban arithmetic.

Interstiality is a theme that is simultaneously genuinely interesting and potentially quite useful, and also a terrible cliché, so if you're going to use it, it helps to be at least respectfully skeptical about the wilder claims of its theoretical partisans, I think.

The city’s a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city were sutured into a third thing, a heartish city, and cities are heart-stained, and hearts are city-stained too.

A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don't look back, don't be each other's anchors, no nostalgia.

The Ambassadors spoke to me in the language of our Hosts. They spoke me: they said me. They warned me that the literal translation of the simile would be inadequate and misleading. *There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a time.* 'It'll be shortened with use,' Bren told me. 'Soon they'll be saying you're a girl ate what was given her.