China Miéville Quotes page 2

“I am often asked is [my work] science fiction or fantasy and my answer is usually ‘Yes’.”

interview with 3am http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/2003/feb/interview_china_mieville.html

“I want to know everything, he says.”

In a panel about his work in Comic Con 2010. Quoted in China Miéville Takes Comic Con http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/08/china-mieville-takes-comic-con.

China Miéville book Iron Council

“Anamnesis” (p. 202)
Iron Council (2004)

““Destiny’s bunk,” said the book. “That’s why this lot aren’t the Propheseers anymore.”
“From here on in,” said Mortar, “we’re the Order of Suggesters.””

China Miéville book Un Lun Dun

Source: Un Lun Dun (2007), Chapter 98, “Fit for Heroes” (p. 419)

“It’s the first principle, isn’t it? Whoever’s arguing fiercest for violence is the cop.”

“In a newsagent’s he picked up a copy of the Standard, and hesitated by the chocolate, looking at the low-fat version he had trained himself to pretend he liked but suddenly hungry for a real bar, which with guilty devil-may-care he took and paid for.”

’Tis the Season (p. 195)
Short Fiction, Looking for Jake (2005)

China Miéville book Go Between

Go Between (p. 129)
Short Fiction, Looking for Jake (2005)

“You make what you see into a window, and you see what you want through it. You make what you see a sort of a door.”

China Miéville book Details

Details (p. 113)
Short Fiction, Looking for Jake (2005)

“Although we revolutionary socialists are always accused of being Utopian, nothing strikes me as more Utopian than the reformist belief that with a bit of tinkering and some good faith, we can systematically improve the world. You have to ask how many decades of broken promises and failed schemes it will take to disprove that hope. Marxism isn’t about saying you’ll get a perfect world: it’s about saying we can get a better world than this one, and it’s hard to imagine, no matter how many mistakes we make, that it could be much worse than the mass starvation, war, oppression, and exploitation we have now. In a world where 30,000 to 40,000 children die of malnutrition daily while grain ships are designed to dump food into the sea if the price dips too low, it’s worth the risk.”

“We say what happens now. We’re taking control. We’re turning around; we’re heading home. Your orders to proceed…are in-fucking-validated.”

Interview with Joan Gordon

China Miéville book The Scar

Part 7 “The Lookout”, chapter 47 (p. 557)
The Scar (2002)

“How is it appropriate to feel? she thought. Only humans dread. Dread is appropriate to nothing. It’s the surplus of animal fear, it’s never indicated, it’s nothing but itself.”

China Miéville book Keep

Keep (p. 280)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“I told myself I had no choice but in a situation like that the choice you have is how you go about not having a choice.”

“We know the axes on which we should judge, and age has never been one.”

The Dusty Hat (p. 211)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“You were sick of sentimentality, of the moralism, maneuvering, and malice that comes with it.”

The Dusty Hat (p. 203)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“Do you even know why you’re angry with me?”

The Dusty Hat (p. 202)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

China Miéville book After the Festival

Simone shouted.
“Oh, I’ll figure something out,” Tova said.
After the Festival (p. 196)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“So what’s your alternative?”

“Abomination from one perspective, it was advertising copy from another.”

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 labour. Than does the millennially paced rage of the steepening shelf of the benthic plain for a system imposed by the cruelest and most crass hydrothermal vent, if that anemone-crusted angle of descent does not propose a submerged lake of black salt.
The Dusty Hat (p. 215)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“Lists make magic, the rhythm of itemized words: you do not list ten techniques, numbered and chantable, in austere prose appropriate for some early-millennium rebooted Book of Thoth, and not know that you have written an incantation.”

The 9th Technique (p. 102)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“They think I’m old-fashioned? Is being against racism and hatred old-fashioned? OK, I’m old-fashioned.”

The 9th Technique (p. 102)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

China Miéville book The Junket

The Junket (p. 320)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“Metamorphosis is death. Inside a pupa larval flesh breaks down utterly, as if in chemical spill. Eyes do not become other eyes nor mouthparts mouths. All parts are lost in a reconfiguring slop, as absolutely formless as a salted slug, that ex liquid nihilo self-organizes into a quite other animal. A cocoon is not a transformation pod but an execution chamber, one that doubles as a birthplace, and is parsimonious with matter.”

“Across the globe, in dark places of the earth, secret lairs were rarely caves of monsters or marvels but markets. Shops. The worst-kept secret in circulation was that certain activities invested items in their proximity with certain affects, effects, and powers, and made them hugely valuable. And that thus it was imperative that they be sold. That, certainly, had been the case for as long as there had been people and things, but there were always fluctuations. The occult economies of charged items were always jostling.”

The 9th Technique (p. 104)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“Moral your artistic proclivities are not, nor fitting for a physician, though I won’t deny the skill in them. They are, I will say it, unnatural.”

The 9th Technique (p. 101)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

China Miéville book The Design

The Design (p. 374)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“She knows most of this, to some extent, and she knows she’s depressed, but if knowing the problem was the solution, most patients wouldn’t need us at all.”

China Miéville book Dreaded Outcome

Dreaded Outcome (p. 159)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“It was an unusually hot afternoon. One of those days all slowly ambling bumblebees and honeysuckle and so forth, at which the English countryside, when it puts its mind to it, excels, and quite unlike any summer day anywhere else. Calm and still and lovely, but never without a sense of something impending. The sort of day one misses even as one experiences it.”

China Miéville book The Design

The Design (p. 377)
Short Fiction, Three Moments of an Explosion (2015)

“What if the chosen one misunderstands what he’s been chosen for?”

China Miéville book The Tain

The Tain (p. 301)
Short Fiction, Looking for Jake (2005)

“You didn’t know, but not knowing is no excuse.”

China Miéville book The Tain

The Tain (p. 254)
Short Fiction, Looking for Jake (2005)

“This was not the time for rage but for politics and strategy.”

China Miéville book The Tain

The Tain (p. 252)
Short Fiction, Looking for Jake (2005)

“The other, more nebulous, but very strong influence of RPGs was the weird fetish for systematization, the way everything is reduced to “game stats.””

“Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable.”

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.<br><br>Interview with Joan Gordon http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/mievilleinterview.htm

“I don’t want to be a simile anymore, I want to be a metaphor.”

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 27 (p. 312)

“There wasn’t even any reasoning. Secrecy was just a bureaucrats’ reflex.”

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 24 (p. 296)

“What theology that would have been, a god self-worshipping, a drug addicted to itself.”

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 22 (p. 276)

“It wasn’t a city anymore, it was a collection of broken places separated by war without politics or acquisition so not war at all really but something more pathological.”

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 18 (p. 239)

“I suppose there were other institutions in Embassytown where the dynamic of the quotidian sustained—some hospitals, perhaps some schools, perhaps houses where shiftparents most deeply loved the children. Whenever any society dies there must be heroes whose fightback is to not change.”

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 18 (p. 238)

“I suspect there was a power struggle in the Embassy, that some would have tried, out of habit, without rationale, to wall up information. They didn’t win.”

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 15 (p. 213)

“A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don’t look back, don’t be each other’s anchors, no nostalgia. I wasn’t expecting any of them to return.”

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 10 (p. 172)

“A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter “Formerly, 1” (p. 53)

“It’s beyond words, there’s no such thing.”

Source: “And there aren’t any.”
“Mmm,” I said. “Awkward.”
“That’s defeatist talk. I’ll cobble something together. A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”
Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 0.3 (p. 37)