For the Right, strikes are both devilish and pathetic, have both terrible and absolutely no effects.

— China Miéville

Heaven might not be what everyone thinks it is, but that don’t mean it’s a myth.

— China Miéville

He was back in the water, not braving but frowning, synchronized swimming, not swimming but sinking, toward the god squid he knew was there, lenticular fleshscape and the moon-sized eye that he never saw but knew, as if the core of the fucking planet was not searing metal but mollusc, as if what we fall toward when we fall, what the apple was heading for when Newton's head got in the way, was kraken.

— China Miéville

History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered.

— China Miéville

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 unspaced 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 haplessness, 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

How do you...? What is it you're doing?" he said to Vary as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutitive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothing's first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense. Vardy even smiled. "Paranoid," he said. "Theology.

— China Miéville

I closed my eyes then, but it was too dark to clearly see that vision that my body would conjure out of blood and the inside of skin when light hit it, but I'd seen it so often, examined it so carefully, that it wasn't hard for me to call to mind.

— China Miéville

I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice...

— China Miéville

If I program ’ware with an Anglo-Unit word and play it, you understand it,” Scale said. “If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Arieses, 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

If you're brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from London to Paris't, or No York, or Helsinki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Homeless.

— China Miéville