Perdido Street Station Quotes

“Its substance was known to me. The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry…each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces.

Every intention, interaction, motivation, every colour, every body, every action and reaction, every piece of physical reality and the thoughts that it engendered, every connection made, every nuanced moment of history and potentiality, every toothache and flagstone, every emotion and birth and banknote, every possible thing ever is woven into that limitless, sprawling web.

It is without beginning or end. It is complex to a degree that humbles the mind. It is a work of such beauty that my soul wept...

..I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“Art is something you choose to make... it's a bringing together of... of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“Old stories would tell how Weavers would kill each other over aesthetic disagreements, such as whether it was prettier to destroy an army of a thousand men or to leave it be, or whether a particular dandelion should or should not be plucked. For a Weaver, to think was to think aesthetically. To act--to Weave--was to bring about more pleasing patterns. They did not eat physical food: they seemed to subsist on the appreciation of beauty.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“I wish that there was nothing to hold me here, that gravity was a suggestion I could ignore.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“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, Perdido Street Station

“A sickly little smile grew and died on his mouth like a fungus.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“I turn away from him and step into the vastness of New Crobuzon, this towering edifice of architecture and history, this complexitude of money and slum, this profane steam-powered god. I turn and walk into the city my home, not bird or garuda, not miserable crossbreed.
I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That's concrete individuality: an individuality that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“I do not dream, der Grimnebulin. I am a calculating machine that has calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neuroses, no hidden depths. My consciousness is a growing function of my processing power, not the baroque thing that sprouts from your mind, with its hidden rooms in attics and cellars.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“New Crobuzon was a city unconvinced by gravity.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“One day I realized that I no longer dreamed of what I would do when I was whole again. My will burned to reach that point, and then suddenly was nothing. I had become nothing more than my desire to fly. I had adjusted, somehow. I had evolved in that unfamiliar region, plodding my stolid way to where the scientists and Remakers of the world congregated. The means had become the end. If I regained my wings, I would become someone new, without the desire that defined me. I saw in that spring damp as I walked endlessly north that I was not looking for fulfilment but for dissolution. I would pass my body on to a newborn, and rest.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“Shadows fell on them like predators as the light went out.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“Isaac liked the idea of an inter-aspectual entity so enamored with knowledge that it just roamed from realm to realm in a bath, murmuring with interest at everything it came across.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“We could take his gag away, thought Isaac, and he wouldn't scream . . . but then he might speak . . . He left the gag in place.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“I can dig my claws into the rim of a building's crown and spread my arms and feel the buffets and gouts of boisterous air and I can close my eyes and remember, for a moment, what it is to fly.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“...and Lublamai no longer thought of screaming but only of watching as those dark markings rolled and boiled in perfect symetry across the wings like clouds in a night sky above, in water below.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“Get back to work, he would tell himself sternly. There's a garuda to get airborne.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“Young mudlarks searching the river quag for scrap had been known to step into some discoloured patch of mud and start speaking long-dead languages, or find locusts in their hair, or fade slowly to translucency and disappear.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“Andrej’s mind, like any sane human’s, … or other sentient being's, was a constantly convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness, the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole. Anrej's mind was not like the cold ratiocination of the Council, nor the poetic dream conciousness of the Weaver ... but with underlying structure and subconcious flow, with calculating rationality and impulsive fancy, self-maximizing analysis and emotional flow, it was [the combination thereof].”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“Работа поглощала её целиком. Хотелось каждый вечер, вернувшись домой, находить там свежеприготовленный фруктовый салат, билеты в театр и секс.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“The choice not to have sex, not to be hurt. The choice not to risk pregnancy. And then... what if she had become pregnant? The choice not to abort? The choice not to have a child?”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“The Demons are afraid of what we are hunting”
― China Mieville, Perdido Street Station

“I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.”
― China Mieville, Perdido Street Station

“Your city institutions... Talking and talking of individuals... but crushing them in layers and hierarchies... until their choices might be between three kinds of squalor.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That’s concrete individuality: an individuality that recognizes that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

“To take the choice of another…to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to…for all we individuals to have…our choices. ”

Kar’uchai shrugged and indicated the world around them vaguely. “Your city institutions…Talking and talking of individuals…but crushing them in layers and hierarchies…until their choices might be between three kinds of squalor.

“We have far less, in the desert. We hunger, sometimes, and thirst. But we have all the choices that we can. Except when someone forgets themselves, forgets the reality of their companions, as if they were an individual alone…And steals food, and takes the choice of others to eat it, or lies about game, and takes the choice of others to hunt it; or grows angry and attacks without reason, and takes the choice of another not to be bruised or live in fear.

“A child who steals the cloak of some beloved other, to smell at night…they take away the choice to wear the cloak, but with respect, with a surfeit of respect.

“Other thefts, though, do not have even respect to mitigate them.

“To kill…not in war or defence, but to…murder…is to have such disrespect, such utter disrespect, that you take not only the choice of whether to live or die that moment…but every other choice for all of time that might be made. Choices beget choices…if they had been allowed their choice to live, they might have chosen to hunt for fish in a salt-swamp, or to play dice, or to tan hides, to write poesy or cook stew…and all those choices are taken from them in that one theft.

“That is choice-theft in the highest degree. But all choice-thefts steal from the future as well as the present.”
― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station