China Miéville Quotes

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

~ China Miéville

The dead are way more organized than the living.

~ China Miéville

In time, in time they tell me, I'll not feel so bad. I don't want time to heal me. There's a reason I'm like this.I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won't smooth you away.I can't say goodbye.

~ China Miéville

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

~ China Miéville

We would never call inexplicable little insights 'hunches,' for fear of drawing the universe's 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.

~ China Miéville

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

~ China Miéville

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.

~ China Miéville

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

~ China Miéville

Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.

~ China Miéville

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 that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing.

~ China Miéville

History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered.

~ China Miéville

If you're brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn't, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless.

~ China Miéville

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

~ China Miéville

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

~ China Miéville

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.

~ China Miéville

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

~ China Miéville

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

~ China Miéville

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

~ 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.

~ China Miéville

I think it's 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

~ China Miéville

Sometimes translation stops you understanding.

~ China Miéville

We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll 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.

~ China Miéville

These felt very much like last moments.

~ China Miéville

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 won't be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.

~ China Miéville

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

~ China Miéville

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

~ China Miéville

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

~ China Miéville

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?

~ China Miéville

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-father's son.

~ China Miéville

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

~ China Miéville

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.

~ China Miéville

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.

~ China Miéville

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

~ China Miéville

I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice...

~ China Miéville

Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn't say their didn't shore it up with footnotes and research.

~ China Miéville

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.

~ China Miéville

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

~ China Miéville

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

~ China Miéville

We should have just killed him, that's a lesson, don't get creative with revenge

~ China Miéville

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 I'd seen it so often, examined it so carefully, that it wasn't hard for me to call to mind.

~ China Miéville