The City & the City Quotes

“Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“Is it more childish and foolish to insist that there is a conspiracy or that there is not?”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“He walked with equipoise, possibly in either city. Schrödinger’s pedestrian.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“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 Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“There is no case,” he told her. “There’s a series of random and implausible crises that make no sense other than if you believe the most dramatic possible shit. And there’s a dead girl at the end of it all.”
― China Miéville, The City & The City

“From that historically brief quite opaque moment, came the chaos of our material history, an anarchy of chronology, of mismatched remnants that delighted and horrified investigators.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“His fidelity to the cliche transcended the necessity to communicate.”
― China Mieville, The City & the City

“You cannot train yourself to successfully and sustainedly unsee and unhear — you do them all the time, but they also fail, repeatedly, and you cheat, repeatedly, in all sorts of small ways. The book mentions that several times. It is absolutely about absolute fidelity to those particular urban protocols, exaggerations or extrapolations of the ones that I think are all around us all the time in the real world; but it's also about cheating them, and failing them, and playing a little fast and loose, which I think is an inextricable part of such norms.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“While yes we can both agree the sudden recovery of this footage smells not a little, and that we appear to be bits of tinfoil-on-string to some malevolent government kitten, yes yes yes but, Borlu, however they've come by this evidence, this is the correct decision.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“Interstiality is a theme that is simultaneously genuinely interesting and potentially quite useful, and also a terrible cliché, so if you're going to use it, it helps to be at least respectfully skeptical about the wilder claims of its theoretical partisans, I think.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“A common form of establishment, for much of Besźel’s history, had been the DöplirCaffé: one Muslim and one Jewish coffeehouse, rented side by side, each with its own counter and kitchen, halal and kosher, sharing a single name, sign, and sprawl of tables, the dividing wall removed. Mixed groups would come, greet the two proprietors, sit together, separating on communitarian lines only long enough to order their permitted food from the relevant side, or ostentatiously from either and both in the case of freethinkers. Whether the DöplirCaffé was one establishment or two depended on who was asking: to a property tax collector, it was always one.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“Volunteering’s an early and strong indication that you’re not suited,” he said.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“We are all philosophers here where I am, and we debate among many other things the question of where it is that we live. On that issue I am a liberal. I live in the interstice yes, but I live in both the city and the city.”
― China Miéville, The City & The City

“They looked like people-shaped clay in the moments before God breathed out.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“…where the two cities are close up they make for interference patterns, harder to read or predict. They are more than a city and a city; that is elementary urban arithmetic.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn't say their didn't shore it up with footnotes and research.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“Is it more foolish and childish to assume there is a conspiracy, or that there is not?”
― China Miéville, The City & The City

“It's not just us keeping them apart. It's everyone in Beszel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We're only the last ditch: it's everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don't blink. That's why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn't work. So if you don't admit it, it does. But if you breach, even if it's not your fault, for more than the shortest time ... you can't come back from that.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“But pass through Copula Hall and she or he might leave Beszel, and at the end of the hall come back to exactly (corporeally) where they had just been, but in another country, a tourist, a marvelling visitor, to a street that shared the latitude-longitude of their own address, a street they had never visited before, whose architecture they had always unseen, to the Ul Qoman house sitting next to and a whole city away from their own building, unvisible there now they had come through, all the way across the Breach, back home.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“If the techs are on it we're fine, but Briamiv and his buddy could fuck up a full stop at the end of a sentence.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“...If she were studying Orciny, and there might be excellent reasons to do so, she'd be doing her doctorate in Folklore or Anthropology or maybe Comp Lit. Granted, the edges of disciplines are getting vague. Also that Mahalia is one of a number of young archaeologists more interested in Foucault and Baudrillard than in Gordon Childe or in trowels.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“And even if you’re right, the CIA paid millions of dollars to men trying to kill goats by staring at them,” I said.”
― China Miéville, The City & The City

“The aim of a PhD’s to ensure that no one, including your advisor, understands what you’re doing after the first couple of years.”
― China Miéville, The City & The City

“Esistono dei posti non intersezionati, ma dove Besźel è interrotta da una sottile parte di Ul Qoma. Da bambini ce la mettevamo tutta per disvedere Ul Qoma, come i nostri genitori e insegnanti ci avevano addestrato a fare in modo incessante (l’ostentazione con la quale noi e le nostre controparti ul qomane usavamo non vederci gli uni con gli altri quando ci trovavamo praticamente gomito a gomito era impressionante).”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“I CHECKED MY WATCH and glanced at the sky, which seemed resistant to morning.”
― China Miéville, The City & The City

“His dad was in the UQ Navy,” he said to me. “Got tinnitus or some shit in a fucking idiot’s skirmish with a Besź tugboat over some disputed lobster pots or whatever.”
― China Miéville, The City & The City

“I’m downstairs. Hurry up, come on. Someone sent a bomb.”
― China Miéville, The City & The City

“One in particular—the younger, named, he told us, Dahar Jaris, not the man Dhatt menaced, but a boy in a battered denim jacket with NoMeansNo written on the back in English print that made me suspect it was the name of a band, not a slogan—had a voice that was familiar.”
― China Miéville, The City & The City

“I still prefer ‘pre-Cleavage’ but it makes an unfortunate pun in English,”
― China Miéville, The City & The City

“their tendency to dutifully follow a script written before they were born.”
― China Miéville, The City & The City