Three Moments of an Explosion Quotes

“Lists make magic, the rhythm of itemised words: you do not list ten techniques, numbered and chantable, in austere prose appropriate for some early-millennium rebooted Book of Thoth, and not know that you have written an incantation.”
― China Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

“Only humans dread. Dread is appropriate to nothing. It’s the surplus of animal fear, it’s never indicated, it’s nothing but itself.”
― China Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion

“None of us have to obey instructions. I consider my own existence proof of that. So much of life is cobbled together when plans go awry. That is often where happiness comes from.”
― China Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion

“So what’s your alternative?” people say, as if that’s logic. We don’t have to have an alternative, that’s not how critique works. We may do, and if we do, you’re welcome, but if we don’t that no more invalidates our hate for this, for what is, than does that of a serf for her lord, her flail-backed insistence that this must end, whether or not she accompanies it with a blueprint for free wage labor.”
― China Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion

“The difficulty is that it’s bad form to talk about them brazenly, but once you’re inducted it’s also a good idea to learn as many rules for as many hands featuring as many cards in as many suits in as many games as you might ever play, just in case.”
― China Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion

“So what’s your alternative?’ people say, as if that’s logic. We don’t have to have an alternative, that’s not how critique works. We may do, and if we do, you’re welcome, but if we don’t that no more invalidates our hate for this, for what is, than does that of a serf for her lord, her flail-backed insistence that this must end, whether or not she accompanies it with a blueprint for free wage labour.”
― China Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

“YouTube videos might be conversing among themselves – their lists and references and cuts parts of their dialect. When we bounce from song to nonsense to meme, we might be eavesdropping on arguments between images. It might be none of it’s for us at all, any more than it’s for us when we sit on a stool and intrude on the interactions of angles of furniture, or when we see a washing line bend under the weight of the wind or a big cloud of starlings and act like we get to be pleased.”
― China Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

“Maybe it was always that way and everyone has always been forever waking in a flustered confusion deep at night trying to believe that the awful sound they think woke them was nothing, or was the nervous bark of a dog, not the sound of violence or of a child weeping in the kind of desolation or terror that demands intervention”
― China Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion

“—Ilse Aichinger, “The Bound Man”
― China Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion

“Sometimes I’d go to his house. If I had some cool cards in my pack of Iceberg Updates, we’d compare collections, maybe swap a few.”
― China Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion

“The Canadians had Terrell. He was uninfected, in quarantine, and knew nothing.”
― China Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion

“Stated most simply, New Death is the condition whereby human corpses now lie always on a horizontal vector—no matter the angle of the surface or the substance of the matter below them—and now orient so that their feet are facing all observers, all the time.”
― China Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion