China Miéville: Trending quotes (page 2)

“Everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me.”

“My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.”

“… where's the skill in being a hero if you were always destined to do it?”

“Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.”

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

“Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote.”

“The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.”

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

“I wish that there was nothing to hold me here, that gravity was a suggestion I could ignore.”

“My Google-fu is strong.”

“For every action, there’s an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers—and one comes true.”

“Art Nouveau was coil-envy.”

“It is more foolish and childish to assume there is a conspiracy, or that there is not?”

“The other, more nebulous, but very strong influence of RPGs was the weird fetish for systematization, the way everything is reduced to “game stats.” If you take something like Cthulhu in Lovecraft, for example, it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu’s “strength,” “dexterity,” and so on, carefully expressed numerically. There’s something superheroically banalifying about that approach to the fantastic. On one level it misses the point entirely, but I must admit it appeals to me in its application of some weirdly misplaced rigor onto the fantastic: it’s a kind of exaggeratedly precise approach to secondary world creation.”

“Ori supposed there were as many unspeakable stories as there were men come back from war.”

“She shouted, “Arms and tongues, Spiral?” and waggled her arms and stuck out her tongue, and the old man crowed and did the same. “He’s for the first, against the second, as I recall,” she said to Ori. “Has he chanted for you? ‘Too much yammer, not enough hammer.’””

“It had some allies. Believe me, there’s nothing so terrible that someone won’t support it.”

“My dad hates umbrellas,” said Deeba, swinging her own. “When it rains he always says the same thing. ‘I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society’s usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level.’”

“He tried to grin but it did not go well.”