These felt very much like last moments.

— China Miéville

The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments.

— China Miéville

The unwritten novel has a basilisk’s stare.

— China Miéville

Were you terrified, Purgatory?" Purgatory nodded eagerly. "There you go, girl: You're a terrorist. You make me twitchy, and under Article Forty-One of the 2000 Terrorism Bill, that's all I need. Time for some reasonable force, I think.

— China Miéville

We should have just killed him, that's a lesson, don't get creative with revenge

— China Miéville

We speak now, or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. Furthermore, 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

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 Marsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang.

— China Miéville

Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.

— China Miéville

You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won't be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.

— China Miéville

You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.

— China Miéville