The Last Days of New Paris Quotes

“In the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“It is becoming exquisite corpse. It is remade. It is without artist. And in its wake, as its wan precision is replaced by that stochastic rigor, that self-dreamed dream, the buildings that it saw into twee perfection are less perfect again. They quiver. Their colors bleed. They are too saturated, their lines are wrong again. They remember their cracks. And then with breaths of stone-dust they are back to ruination, or are not there, or are battered by age, scarred with the stuff of history, again. Paris is Paris”
― China Mieville, The Last Days of New Paris

“With the city like this, don’t we have greater needs than poetry?”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“A blast, an acceleration, the distillate, the spirit, the history, the weaponized soul of convulsive beauty went critical.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“At dawn a great shark mouth appears at the horizon smiling like a stupid angel and chewing silently on the sky.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“The poets and artists and philosophers, resistance activists, secret scouts and troublemakers, had become, as they must, soldiers. Now,”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“Devils and Nazis don’t work well together.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“And Thibault almost falls in astonishment because he sees the man unconcerned by any of the bullets that hit him; he sees him look hard at the closest shooter, and where the man looks, a house rises. Emerging instantly from nothing, clean, freshly painted, fussily rendered, pale, almost translucent. And the soldier, all the soldiers who were where the house is now are gone. Replaced, with a sweep of attention, disappeared from this scene.
The facades of Paris reappear as the figure stares, and they are prettier and far more perfect than they have ever looked, and they are quite empty.
"It was never Fall Rot," says Sam. "Kill Fall Rot and we have called up a manif. Oh dear god. It's bringing a city."
The young man makes it with every look, is reestablishing Paris in pastel outlines, no not reestablishing but establishing newly, a simpering pretense, as it had never been. A cloying imaginary.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“there, on the fifth corner, is Les Deux Magots.
The cafe's green awning flaps frantically, pushed outward by a rushing wind from within. Around it are tables and chairs, all heaving up and suspended as if about to fly away; then spasming back to their positions on the ground. Up again, head-height and back. As they have jumped for years. The windows are blown out repeatedly, surrounded by broken glass that twitches and snaps back into the panes and then out again, repeatedly, an oscillating instant of combustion. The café rumbles.
Sam walks heavily toward it, into the empty road around it. It looks as if the air exhausts her, as if she walks against a gale. She stops, gasping, still meters from the entrance. The air rushes in Thibault's ears.
It was from here that the S-Blast came.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“Why do you think it does work?" It's not as if any of this stuff is true."

"Maybe devils love ritual as much as people do," she said.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“Objects foraged out of Nazis' quarantine, fenced for colossal sums in the black markets of the world outside. Manifs stolen while the partisans fight for liberation, while Thibaut and his comrades face down devils and fascists and errant art, and die.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“In the fecund shock-waves of the explosion, it was not only the Surrealists' own dreams that had manifested. Born with them were symbols from Symbolism and Decadence, imaginings of the surrealists' ancestors and beloveds, ghosts from their proto-canon.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“Can living artwork die? Can it live before it dies?”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“In Paris you had to be ready to fight art and the Hellish—not to mention Nazis—so they labored under weapons for all eventualities.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“So there I am, wondering what to do, and I see you, and I see what you're carrying. And _that_ is why I came running after you. Because I do not believe in coincidence.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“The poets and artists and philosophers, resistance activists, secret scouts and troublemakers, had become, as they must, soldiers.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“Liberation was fucked up.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“Surrealism comes for us all, Thibaut thinks.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“That,” she says, “is what I am. I am what’s been sent for.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris