01c. 1972 ADIn the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.China Miéville / quote ↗
02c. 1972 ADA mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.It has been given many names. Each inlet and bay and stream has been classified as if it were discrete. But it is one thing, where borders are absurd. It fills the space between stones and sand, curling around coastlines and filling trenches between the continents.China Miéville / quote ↗
03c. 1972 ADThe sea is full of saints. You know that? You know that: you're a big boy. The sea's full of saints and it's been full of saints for years. Since longer than anything. Saints were there before there were even gods. They were waiting for them, and they're still there now.Saints eat fish and shellfish. Some of them catch jellyfish and some of them eat rubbish. Some saints eat anything they can find. They hide under rocks; they turn themselves inside out: they spit up spirals. There's nothing saints don't do. Make this shape with your hands. Like that. Move your fingers. There, you made a saint. Look out, here come another one! Now they're fighting! Yours won.There aren't any big corkscrew saints anymore, but there are still ones like sacks and ones like coils, and ones like robes with flapping sleeves. What's your favourite saint? I'll tell you mine. But wait a minute, first, do you know what it is makes them all saints? They're all a holy family, they're all cousins. Of each other, and of ... you know what else they're cousins of?That's right. Of gods.Alright now. Who was it made you? You know what to say.Who made you?China Miéville / quote ↗
05c. 1972 ADFor the Right, strikes are both devilish and pathetic, have both terrible and absolutely no effects.China Miéville / quote ↗
06c. 1972 ADShe was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.China Miéville / quote ↗
07c. 1972 ADThe summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments.China Miéville / quote ↗
08c. 1972 ADThat's what gets converts these days," Baron said. "It's a buyers' market in apocalypse. What's hot in heresy's Armageddon.China Miéville / quote ↗
09c. 1972 ADA trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.China Miéville / quote ↗
10c. 1972 ADYou'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.China Miéville / quote ↗
11c. 1972 ADThere’s a big default notion that “spare,” or “precise” prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it’s in no way intrinsically more accurate, more relevant, or better than lush prose. That adjective “precise,” for example, needs unpicking. If a “minimalist” writer describes a table, and a metaphor-ridden adjective-heavy weird fictioneer describes a table, they are very different, but the former is in absolutely no way closer to the material reality than the latter. Both of them are radically different from that reality. They’re just words. A table is a big wooden thing with my tea on it.China Miéville / quote ↗
