02c. 1972 ADYou 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 / quote ↗
03c. 1972 ADWord spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.China Miéville / quote ↗
04c. 1972 ADHeaven might not be what everyone thinks it is, but that don’t mean it’s a myth.China Miéville / quote ↗
05c. 1972 ADBeing a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.China Miéville / quote ↗
06c. 1972 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
07c. 1972 ADSaul 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 / quote ↗
09c. 1972 ADPeople 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 / quote ↗
10c. 1972 ADA 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 / quote ↗
11c. 1972 ADHow do you...? What is it you're doing?" he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutitive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense.Vardy even smiled. "Paranoid," he said. "Theology.China Miéville / quote ↗
12c. 1972 ADI needed to be alone for whatever would happen. I knew that something would as certainly as if this were a last chapter.China Miéville / quote ↗
13c. 1972 ADI'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice...China Miéville / quote ↗
14c. 1972 ADLike 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 / quote ↗
15c. 1972 ADSo 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 / quote ↗
16c. 1972 ADA sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.China Miéville / quote ↗
17c. 1972 ADWere 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 / quote ↗
18c. 1972 ADWe should have just killed him, that's a lesson, don't get creative with revengeChina Miéville / quote ↗
19c. 1972 ADI 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 / quote ↗
20c. 1972 ADThe point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That's concrete individuality: an individuality that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.China Miéville / quote ↗
21c. 1972 ADA promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?China Miéville / quote ↗
23c. 1972 ADDark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children.China Miéville / quote ↗
24c. 1972 ADHe was back in the water, not braving but frowning, synchronised swimming, not swimming but sinking, toward the godsquid he knew was there, tentacular fleshscape and the moon-sized eye that he never saw but knew, as if the core of the fucking planet was not searing metal but mollusc, as if what we fall toward when we fall, what the apple was heading for when Newton's head got in the way, was kraken.China Miéville / quote ↗
