China Miéville

But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse.

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

There__ a big default notion that __pare,_ or __recise_ prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it__ in no way intrinsically more accurate, more relevant, or better than lush prose. That adjective __recise,_ for example, needs unpicking. If a __inimalist_ writer describes a table, and a metaphor-ridden adjective-heavy weird fictioneer describes a table, they are very different, but the former is in absolutely no way closer to the material reality than the latter. Both of them are radically different from that reality. They__e just words. A table is a big wooden thing with my tea on it.

Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.

A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.

That's what gets converts these days," Baron said. "It's a buyers' market in apocalypse. What's hot in heresy's Armageddon.

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.

She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.

For the Right, strikes are both devilish and pathetic, have both terrible and absolutely no effects.

My Google-fu is strong.

The sea is full of saints. You know that? You know that: you're a big boy. The sea's full of saints and it's been full of saints for years. Since longer than anything. Saints were there before there were even gods. They were waiting for them, and they're still there now.Saints eat fish and shellfish. Some of them catch jellyfish and some of them eat rubbish. Some saints eat anything they can find. They hide under rocks; they turn themselves inside out: they spit up spirals. There's nothing saints don't do. Make this shape with your hands. Like that. Move your fingers. There, you made a saint. Look out, here come another one! Now they're fighting! Yours won.There aren't any big corkscrew saints anymore, but there are still ones like sacks and ones like coils, and ones like robes with flapping sleeves. What's your favourite saint? I'll tell you mine. But wait a minute, first, do you know what it is makes them all saints? They're all a holy family, they're all cousins. Of each other, and of ... you know what else they're cousins of?That's right. Of gods.Alright now. Who was it made you? You know what to say.Who made you?

A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.It has been given many names. Each inlet and bay and stream has been classified as if it were discrete. But it is one thing, where borders are absurd. It fills the space between stones and sand, curling around coastlines and filling trenches between the continents.

In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.

He was back in the water, not braving but frowning, synchronised swimming, not swimming but sinking, toward the godsquid he knew was there, tentacular fleshscape and the moon-sized eye that he never saw but knew, as if the core of the fucking planet was not searing metal but mollusc, as if what we fall toward when we fall, what the apple was heading for when Newton's head got in the way, was kraken.

Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children.

The unwritten novel has a basilisk__ stare.

A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?

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.