China Miéville

I closed my eyes then but it was too dark to clearly see that vision that my body would conjure out of blood and the inside of skin when light hit it, but I'd seen it so often, examined it so carefully, that it wasn't hard for me to call to mind.

We should have just killed him, that's a lesson, don't get creative with revenge

Were you terrified, Murgatroyd?" Murgatroyd nodded eagerly. "There you go, girl: You're a terrorist. You make me twitchy, and under Article Forty-One of the 2000 Terrorism Bill, that's all I need. Time for some reasonable force, I think.

A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.

So what__ your alternative?_ people say, as if that__ logic. We don__ have to have an alternative, that__ not how critique works. We may do, and if we do, you__e welcome, but if we don__ 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.

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.

I needed to be alone for whatever would happen. I knew that something would as certainly as if this were a last chapter.

How do you...? What is it you're doing?" he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutitive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense.Vardy even smiled. "Paranoid," he said. "Theology.

I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice...

A few mad exaggerations, alright, within a couple of days: swear to fucking god, they were like throwing grenades and pulling out all kinds of crazy knackery, it was out of control. Whatever. As if the story, if big enough, reflected glory on the teller.

People have wanted to narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There__l be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights.

In time, in time they tell me, I'll not feel so bad. I don't want time to heal me. There's a reason I'm like this.I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won't smooth you away.I can't say goodbye.

Shadows fell on them like predators as the light went out.

Saul was going to kill Anansi.They both knew it. Saul was going to kill Anansi and Loplop and King Rat, and Saul was going to die, all in an effort to prove that he was not his rat-father's son.

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?

Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

Heaven might not be what everyone thinks it is, but that don__ mean it__ a myth.

Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.