Quotes from Embassytown

“Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“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 from Embassytown

“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 from Embassytown

“A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“I don't want to be a simile anymore,' I said. "I want to be a metaphor.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice...”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“I 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 from Embassytown

“We have to establish our credentials as an explorocracy; so to survive and rule ourselves, we have to explore.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“BEFORE THE HUMANS came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much. Before the humans came we didn’t speak.” He glanced at me. “We didn’t walk on our wings. We didn’t walk. We didn’t swallow earth. We didn’t swallow.” Scile was reading nervously, quickly. “‘There’s a Terre who swims with fishes, one who wore no clothes, one who ate what was given her, one who walks backwards. There’s a rock that was broken and cemented together. I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion. I’m like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I wasn’t not like the rock that was broken and cemented together. “‘I do what I always do, I’m like the Terre who swims with fishes. I’m not unlike that Terre. I’m very like it. ‘I’m not water. I’m not water. I’m water.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“Now the Ariekei were learning to speak, and to think, and it hurt.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“Oh, bullshit. This isn't one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals, one slip of the tongue or misuse of sacred cutlery, and bang, he's on the grill. Do you ever think about how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretending to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops, we said the wrong thing, but they're really all about how ridiculous natives overreact. Avice, we must have made thousands of fuckups like that over the years. Think about it. Just like our visitors did when they first met our lot, on Terre. And for the most part we didn't lose our shit, did we?”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“There are no telepaths in this universe, I think, but there are empathics, with languages so silent that they may as well be sharing thoughts.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“Its surface sheened with saft that evaporated out from its crystal shielding in threads that degraded to nothing.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“As an immerser I progressed to the ranks I aspired to—those that granted me a certain cachet and income while keeping me from fundamental responsibilities. This is what I excelled at: the life-technique of aggregated skill, luck, laziness and chutzpah that we call floaking.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don't look back, don't be each other's anchors, no nostalgia.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“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 from Embassytown

“Language is the continuation of coercion by other means."
"Bullshit. It's cooperation." Both theories explained what had happened plausibly. I resisted, because it felt trite, saying that they weren't as contradictory as they sounded.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“The sounds aren’t where the meaning lives. […]

Their language is organised noise, like all of ours are, but for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen. […]

When they speak they do hear the soul in each voice. That’s how the meaning lives there. The words have got . . .” He shook his head, hesitating, then just using that religiose term. “Got the soul in them. And it has to be there, the meaning. Has to be true to be Language.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“They hammered it with sometimes-guns, that violently assert the manchmal, this stuff, our everyday, against the always of the immer.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“The return to anywhere you last visited as a child is difficult, especially when it’s a door. Your heart beats harder when you knock.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“You’d have known that without being told if you let yourself think about it.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“Oh, bullshit,” Wyatt said. I blinked. “This isn’t one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals, one slip of the tongue or misuse of sacred cutlery, and bang, he’s on the grill. Do you ever think how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretend to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops we said the wrong thing, but they’re really all about how ridiculous natives overreact.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“Oratees are addicts. Strung out on an Ambassador’s Language.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

“Tell me," Bren said. "I thought you'd despaired."
"I did, too."
"What then? Tell me."
I told him. Revelation was spoiled for him, but I can retain it here, for you.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown

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Popular quotes

“Alack, sir, no; her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love. We cannot call her winds and waters sighs and tears; they are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report: this cannot be cunning in her; if it be, she makes a shower of rain as well as Jove.”
― William Shakespeare, quote from Antony and Cleopatra

“Remember this feeling. This is the moment you stop being the rabbit.”
― Nora Sakavic, quote from The Foxhole Court

“And I learned that it's a bad idea to curse if you're in trouble, but a good idea to sing, if you can.”
― Tobias Wolff, quote from This Boy's Life

“Is there a bird among them, dear boy?” Charity asked innocently, peering not at the things on the desk, but at his face, noting the muscle beginning to twitch at Ian’s tense jaw.
“No.”
“Then they must be in the schoolroom! Of course,” she said cheerfully, “that’s it. How like me, Hortense would say, to have made such a silly mistake.”
Ian dragged his eyes from the proof that his grandfather had been keeping track of him almost from the day of his birth-certainly from the day when he was able to leave the cottage on his own two legs-to her face and said mockingly, “Hortense isn’t very perceptive. I would say you are as wily as a fox.”
She gave him a little knowing smile and pressed her finger to her lips. “Don’t tell her, will you? She does so enjoy thinking she is the clever one.”
“How did he manage to have these drawn?” Ian asked, stopping her as she turned away.
“A woman in the village near your home drew many of them. Later he hired an artist when he knew you were going to be somewhere at a specific time. I’ll just leave you here where it’s nice and quiet.” She was leaving him, Ian knew, to look through the items on the desk. For a long moment he hesitated, and then he slowly sat down in the chair, looking over the confidential reports on himself. They were all written by one Mr. Edgard Norwich, and as Ian began scanning the thick stack of pages, his anger at his grandfather for this outrageous invasion of his privacy slowly became amusement. For one thing, nearly every letter from the investigator began with phrases that made it clear the duke had chastised him for not reporting in enough detail. The top letter began,

I apologize, Your Grace, for my unintentional laxness in failing to mention that indeed Mr. Thornton enjoys an occasional cheroot…

The next one opened with,

I did not realize, Your Grace, that you would wish to know how fast his horse ran in the race-in addition to knowing that he won.

From the creases and holds in the hundreds of reports it was obvious to Ian that they’d been handled and read repeatedly, and it was equally obvious from some of the investigator’s casual comments that his grandfather had apparently expressed his personal pride to him:

You will be pleased to know, Your Grace, that young Ian is a fine whip, just as you expected…
I quite agree with you, as do many others, that Mr. Thornton is undoubtedly a genius…
I assure you, Your Grace, that your concern over that duel is unfounded. It was a flesh wound in the arm, nothing more.

Ian flipped through them at random, unaware that the barricade he’d erected against his grandfather was beginning to crack very slightly.
“Your Grace,” the investigator had written in a rare fit of exasperation when Ian was eleven,

“the suggestion that I should be able to find a physician who might secretly look at young Ian’s sore throat is beyond all bounds of reason. Even if I could find one who was willing to pretend to be a lost traveler, I really cannot see how he could contrive to have a peek at the boy’s throat without causing suspicion!”

The minutes became an hour, and Ian’s disbelief increased as he scanned the entire history of his life, from his achievements to his peccadilloes. His gambling gains and losses appeared regularly; each ship he added to his fleet had been described, and sketches forwarded separately; his financial progress had been reported in minute and glowing detail.”
― Judith McNaught, quote from Almost Heaven

“Being part of a secret is a great source of strength.”
― Eoin Colfer, quote from Airman

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