The collection / 60 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1972 AD

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

China Miéville / quote

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02c. 1972 AD

The dead are way more organized than the living.

China Miéville / quote

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03c. 1972 AD

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 / quote

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04c. 1972 AD

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

China Miéville / quote

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05c. 1972 AD

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 / quote

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06c. 1972 AD

I know, I know," Moore said. "Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean something else?" Shook his head. "What an awfully arrogant thing. What if faiths are exactly what they are? And mean exactly what they say?" "Stop trying to make sense of it and just listen," Dane said."And what," Moore said, "if a large part of the reason they're so tenacious is that they're perfectly accurate?

China Miéville / quote

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07c. 1972 AD

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

China Miéville / quote

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08c. 1972 AD

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 / quote

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09c. 1972 AD

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 / quote

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10c. 1972 AD

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 / quote

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11c. 1972 AD

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 / quote

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12c. 1972 AD

History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered.

China Miéville / quote

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13c. 1972 AD

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 / quote

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14c. 1972 AD

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

China Miéville / quote

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15c. 1972 AD

I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is a fairy tale.

China Miéville / quote

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16c. 1972 AD

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

China Miéville / quote

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17c. 1972 AD

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 / quote

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18c. 1972 AD

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 / quote

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19c. 1972 AD

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 / quote

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20c. 1972 AD

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

China Miéville / quote

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21c. 1972 AD

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 / quote

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22c. 1972 AD

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 / quote

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23c. 1972 AD

Sometimes translation stops you understanding.

China Miéville / quote

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24c. 1972 AD

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 / quote

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