“Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“Is it more childish and foolish to insist that there is a conspiracy or that there is not?”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“He walked with equipoise, possibly in either city. Schrödinger’s pedestrian.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“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 from The City & the City
“From that historically brief quite opaque moment, came the chaos of our material history, an anarchy of chronology, of mismatched remnants that delighted and horrified investigators.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“You cannot train yourself to successfully and sustainedly unsee and unhear you do them all the time, but they also fail, repeatedly, and you cheat, repeatedly, in all sorts of small ways. The book mentions that several times. It is absolutely about absolute fidelity to those particular urban protocols, exaggerations or extrapolations of the ones that I think are all around us all the time in the real world; but it's also about cheating them, and failing them, and playing a little fast and loose, which I think is an inextricable part of such norms.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“While yes we can both agree the sudden recovery of this footage smells not a little, and that we appear to be bits of tinfoil-on-string to some malevolent government kitten, yes yes yes but, Borlu, however they've come by this evidence, this is the correct decision.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“There is no case,” he told her. “There’s a series of random and implausible crises that make no sense other than if you believe the most dramatic possible shit. And there’s a dead girl at the end of it all.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“Interstiality is a theme that is simultaneously genuinely interesting and potentially quite useful, and also a terrible cliché, so if you're going to use it, it helps to be at least respectfully skeptical about the wilder claims of its theoretical partisans, I think.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“His fidelity to the cliche transcended the necessity to communicate.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn't say their didn't shore it up with footnotes and research.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“At the social/political/ juridical, etc., level, the organizing principle was less to do with games and more to do with the nature of taboos—enormously powerful, often enormously arbitrary, and (crucially) regularly quietly broken, without undermining the fact of the taboo itself. That last element, I think, is sometimes underestimated in the discussions of cultural norms, where they are both asserted and breached. Both those elements are foundational.
— author interview”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“…where the two cities are close up they make for interference patterns, harder to read or predict. They are more than a city and a city; that is elementary urban arithmetic.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“If the techs are on it we're fine, but Briamiv and his buddy could fuck up a full stop at the end of a sentence.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“But here’s the problem you’re not addressing. While yes we can both agree the sudden recovery of this footage smells not a little, and that we appear to be bits of tinfoil-on-string to some malevolent government kitten, yes yes yes but, Borlú, however they’ve come by the evidence, this is the correct decision.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“Volunteering’s an early and strong indication that you’re not suited,” he said.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“But pass through Copula Hall and she or he might leave Beszel, and at the end of the hall come back to exactly (corporeally) where they had just been, but in another country, a tourist, a marvelling visitor, to a street that shared the latitude-longitude of their own address, a street they had never visited before, whose architecture they had always unseen, to the Ul Qoman house sitting next to and a whole city away from their own building, unvisible there now they had come through, all the way across the Breach, back home.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“It's not just us keeping them apart. It's everyone in Beszel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We're only the last ditch: it's everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don't blink. That's why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn't work. So if you don't admit it, it does. But if you breach, even if it's not your fault, for more than the shortest time ... you can't come back from that.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“...If she were studying Orciny, and there might be excellent reasons to do so, she'd be doing her doctorate in Folklore or Anthropology or maybe Comp Lit. Granted, the edges of disciplines are getting vague. Also that Mahalia is one of a number of young archaeologists more interested in Foucault and Baudrillard than in Gordon Childe or in trowels.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“The early years of a Bes (and presumably an Ul Qoman) child are intense learnings of cues. We pick up styles of clothing, permissible colours, ways of walking and holding oneself, very fast. Before we were eight or so most of us could be trusted not to breach embarrassingly and illegally, though licence of course is granted children every moment they are in the street.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“They looked like people-shaped clay in the moments before God breathed out.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“«Si riferisce ai loro poteri magici? Vorrei, lo vorrei tanto. Ma anche così questi scavi sono incomparabili. La cultura materiale non ha nessun senso. Non esiste nessun’altra parte al mondo in cui si possa riportare alla luce quelli che sembrano oggetti della tarda antichità con bordi taglienti, reperti in bronzo bellissimi e compositi mischiati con materiale palesemente neolitico. Con questa roba è come se la stratigrafia andasse a farsi benedire. È stata usata come prova contro il matrix di Harris... erroneamente, ma capirà perché. Ecco perché questi scavi sono così popolari fra i giovani archeologi.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“Tutte le note erano come a strati, un palinsesto di interpretazione in progresso. Feci archeologia.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“And even if you’re right, the CIA paid millions of dollars to men trying to kill goats by staring at them,” I said.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“Same weather over here as back home," I said.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
“How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Besź maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realise that they live, grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border.”
― China Miéville, quote from The City & the City
China Miéville
Born place: in Norwich, England, The United Kingdom
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“It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from Goldfinger
“I think… that love encompasses the experience of the possible transition from the pure randomness of chance to a state that has universal value. Starting out from something that is simply an
encounter, a trifle, you learn that you can experience the world on the basis of difference and not only in terms of identity. And you can even be tested and suffer in the process. In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that. Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual favours, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal implications: it is an individual experience of potential universality, and is thus central to philosophy, as Plato was the first to intuit.”
― Alain Badiou, quote from In Praise of Love
“You know, if it weren't for Earth's beauty-the birds-flowers-trees-I would never go back. It's too much trouble.”
― Michael Newton, quote from Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives
“Many of the seminal social issues of our time - poverty, lack of education, human trafficking, war and torture, domestic abuse - can track their way to our theology of, or beliefs about, women, which has its roots in what we believe about the nature, purposes, and character of God.”
― Sarah Bessey, quote from Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible's View of Women
“Suddenly, unexpectedly, someone is using the ugly powers of war, which horrify me, to try to pull and drag me away from the shores of peace, from the happiness of wonderful friendships, playing and love. I feel like a swimmer who was made to enter the cold war, against her will. I feel shocked, sad, unhappy and frightened and I wonder where they are forcing me to go, I wonder why they have taken away the peaceful and lovely shores of my childhood. I used to rejoice at each new day, because each was beautiful in its own way. I used to rejoice at the sun, at playing, at songs. In short, I enjoyed my childhood. I had no need of a better one. I have less and less strength to keep swimming in these cold waters. So take me back to the shores of my childhood, where I was warm, happy and content, like all the children whose childhood and the right to enjoy it are now being destroyed.”
― Zlata Filipović, quote from Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
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The Rise of Theodore...BookQuoters 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.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
