“People 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 from Railsea
“Technically, our name, to those who speak science, is Homo sapiens— wise person. But we have been described in many other ways. Homo narrans, juridicus, ludens, diaspora: we are storytelling, legal, game-playing, scattered people, too. True but incomplete. That old phrase has the secret. We are all, have always been, will always be, Homo vorago aperientis: person before whom opens a vast & awesome hole.”
― China Miéville, quote from Railsea
“Do please,” said Captain Naphi, “expedite this journey relevance-ward.”
― China Miéville, quote from Railsea
“Heaven might not be what everyone thinks it is, but that don’t mean it’s a myth.”
― China Miéville, quote from Railsea
“Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.”
― China Miéville, quote from Railsea
“There were times, Sham felt, when the captains regretted there being only two types of limb they could lose to their obsessions.”
― China Miéville, quote from Railsea
“There was a time when wen we did not form all our words as we do now, in writing on a page. There was a time when the word "&" was written with several distinct & separate letters. It seems madness now. But there it is, & there is nothing we can do about it.
Humanity learned to ride the rails, & that motion made us what we are, a ferromaritime people. The lines of the railsea go everywhere but from one place straight to another. It is always switchback, junction, coils around & over our own train-trails.
What word better could there be to symbolize the railsea that connects & separates all lands, than “&” itself? Where else does the railsea take us, but to one place & that one & that one & that one, & so on? & what better embodies, in the sweep of the pen, the recurved motion of trains, than “&”?
An efficient route from where we start to where we end would make the word the tiniest line. But it takes a veering route, up & backwards, overshooting & correcting, back down again south & west, crossing its own earlier path, changing direction, another overlap, to stop, finally, a few hairs’ width from where we began.
& tacks & yaws, switches on its way to where it’s going, as we all must do.”
― China Miéville, quote from Railsea
“History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered.”
― China Miéville, quote from Railsea
“Standing there on his new perch, Sham was overwhelmingly bored of feeling overwhelmed. The more he worked, he realized, the quicker he worked.”
― China Miéville, quote from Railsea
China Miéville
Born place: in Norwich, England, The United Kingdom
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“Damn, I was lonely that autumn. I wished for a girl I could hang out with. I never
really did anything to meet girls, too shy, too fucked up. Autumn makes
me think of women.”
― Henry Rollins, quote from The Portable Henry Rollins
“Under the Iranian code, the worth of a woman’s life equals half of a man’s, a point that often leads to grotesque legal judgments that effectively punish the victims. In this instance, the judge ruled that the ‘blood money’ for the two men was worth more than the life of the murdered nine-year-old girl, and he demanded that her family come up with thousands of dollars to finance their executions.”
― Shirin Ebadi, quote from Iran Awakening
“It has always been essential to keep women riveted on the details of submission so as to divert women from thinking about the nature of force—especially the sexual force that necessitates sexual submission. The mothers could not ward off the enthusiasm of sexual liberation—its energy, its hope, its bright promise of sexual equality—because they could not or would not tell what they knew about the nature and quality of male sexuality as they had experienced it, as practiced on them in marriage. They knew the simple logic of promiscuity, which the girls did not: that what one man could do, ten men could do ten times over. The girls did not understand that logic because the girls did not know fully what one man could do. And the mothers failed to convince also because the only life they offered was a repeat version of their own: and the girls were close enough to feel the inconsolable sadness and the dead tiredness of those lives, even if they did not know how or why mother had gotten the way she was.”
― Andrea Dworkin, quote from Right Wing Women
“She had a strange, wild beauty, a face that was disconcerting at first, but unforgettable. Her eyes in particular had an expression, at once voluptuous and fierce, that I have never seen on any human face. 'Gypsy's eye, wolf's eye' is a phrase Spaniards apply to people with keen powers of observation.”
― Prosper Mérimée, quote from Carmen
“It's my personal onion theory. See, it's like we've all got layers on layers, going deep inside, to layer ten, that place where we're spiritual and private. But we don't show those deep layers.”
― Dandi Daley Mackall, quote from My Boyfriends' Dogs: The Tales of Adam and Eve and Shirley
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The KeeperBookQuoters 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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