“Any moment called now is always full of possibles.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“We should have just killed him, that's a lesson, don't get creative with revenge”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“Someone came in all Starfleet badges today. Not on my shift, sadly.'
'Fascist,' Leon had said. 'Why are you so prejudiced against nerds?'
'Please,' Billy said. 'That would be a bit self-hating, wouldn't it?'
'Yeah, but you pass. You're like, you're in deep cover,' Leon said. 'You can sneak out of the nerd ghetto and hide the badge and bring back food and clothes and word of the outside world.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“Subby Subby Subby," whispered Goss. "Keep those little bells on your slippers as quiet as you can. Sparklehorse and Starpink have managed to creep out of Apple Palace past all the monkeyfish, but if we're silent as tiny goblins we can surprise them and then all frolic off together in the Meadow of Happy Kites.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“We cannot see the universe. We are in the darkness of a trench, a deep cut, dark water heavier than earth, presences lit by our own blood, little biolumes, heroic and pathetic Promethei too afraid or weak to steal fire but able still to love. Gods are among us and they care nothing and are nothing like us.
This is how we are brave: we worship them anyway.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“He knows religion is bollocks," Collingswood said. "He just wishes he didn't.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“The light was going: some cloud cover arriving, as if summoned by drama.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“Virgina Woolf versus Edward Lear."
"Christ Alive," said Billy. "Are those my only choices?"
"I went for Lear," said Leon. "Partly out of fidelity to the letter L. Partly because given the choice between nonsense and boojy wittering you blatantly have to choose nonsense.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“As he got older, Billy suspected, he would, Dicaprio-like, simply become like an increasingly wizened child.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“Dane discarded his speargun with visible relief. As a paladin of the Church of God Kraken, he had few options. Like many groups devoid of real power and realpolitik, the church was actually constrained by its aesthetics. Its operatives could not have guns, simply, because guns were not squiddy enough.
It was a common moan. Drunk new soldiers of the Cathedral of the Bees might whine: “It’s not that I don’t think sting-tipped blowpipes aren’t cool, it’s just…” “I’ve gotten rally good with the steam-cudgel,” a disaffected Pistonpunk might ask her elders “but wouldn’t it be useful to…?” Oh for a carbine, devout assassins pined.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“You got to be worried when they're agreeing about anything," she said. "Prophets. That's the last bloody thing you want prophets to do.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“Fortune-telling was quantum betting, a competitive scrying of variably likely outcomes.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“Just her, three men, a fidgety pig and lawful intent.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“Of all the skills necessary for her work, what she was perhaps worst at was being polite to inanimate things.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“When he had first started at the center, he had liked to think that he was unexpectedly cool-looking for such a job. Now he knew that he surprised no one, that no one expected scientists to look like scientists anymore.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“How 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 from Kraken
“A 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 from Kraken
“Some midnight-of-all or other [apocalypse] was predicted every few days or nights. Most came to nothing, leaving relevant prophets cringing with a unique embarrassment as the sum rose. It was a very particular shame, that of now ex-worshippers avoiding each other's eyes in the unexpected aftermath of 'final' acts -- crimes, admissions, debaucheries and abandon.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“And the continual non-up-turnance of so valuable a commodity as a giant squid—the thought of getting their alembics on which made the city’s alchemists whine like dogs—was provoking more and more interest from London’s repo-men and -women.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“Your job is to get villains. Right? You'll have to know what to do. If you don't know, you have to find out. If you can't find out you bloody well make it up and then you make it so.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
“It ain't that he's not interested in, like, persuasiveness, get me? He's interested in it. Like something in a jar.”
― China Miéville, quote from Kraken
China Miéville
Born place: in Norwich, England, The United Kingdom
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“But sometimes I really felt as though the starry sky rose and fell with the gasping of his chest.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from The Complete Stories
“And it's not just a matter of you hurting me. I will hurt you too, even if I don't want to, I'm not the girl you think I am. And you will remember this conversation , and wish that you'd listened to me.”
― Cinda Williams Chima, quote from The Exiled Queen
“But Felix was no longer Felix. He was a vampire motherfucker.”
― Guillermo del Toro, quote from The Strain
“...[A] friend is someone who gives you trust because they want to, not because they have to.”
― D.J. MacHale, quote from The Merchant of Death
“Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist’s nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it creates beauty and to grant sympathy and homage to aristocratic preferences.”
― Thomas Mann, quote from Death in Venice and Other Tales
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The Storyteller
The Lady In The VanBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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