96 quotes
It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It’s only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.
Embassytown (2011)
If you take something like Cthulhu in Lovecraft, for example, it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu's “strength,” “dexterity,” and so on, carefully expressed numerically.
I see echoes with lots of books in all my books, some deliberate, some unconscious until later, and as long as that is respectful I think that's great - writing on the shoulders of other writers is a privilege.
Faint cries and industrial drones sounded from dark windows set into its brick banks, some of them below the high-water mark. Prisons and torture-chambers and workshops, and their bastard hybrids, the punishment factories, where the condemned were Remade.
Perdido Street Station (2000)
“She probably used proxies and a cleaner-upper online too, because there was bugger-all of interest in her cache.”
“You have no idea what you’re saying, do you, boss?”
“None at all. I had the techies write it all out phonetically for me.”
The City & the City (2009)
This was the most difficult, the most extraordinary transition. Her body had been a source of shame and disgust; to engage in activities with no purpose at all except to revel in their sheer physicality had first nauseated, then terrified, and finally liberated her.
Perdido Street Station (2000)
"Part of you understands without recourse to words, even if your higher mind asks questions in a format which renders an answer impossible." He looked at her triumphantly. "You too are the bastard-zone, Ms. Lin! Your art takes place where your understanding and your ignorance blur."
Perdido Street Station (2000)
The sea. I bet you the sea might have ideas. Wouldn’t surprise me if the bastard ocean might have a little something to do with all this. Stands to reason, right? Taking back what’s its? Render unto sea, sir.
Kraken: An Anatomy (2010)
Marxism isn’t about saying you’ll get a perfect world: it’s about saying we can get a better world than this one, and it’s hard to imagine, no matter how many mistakes we make, that it could be much worse than the mass starvation, war, oppression, and exploitation we have now.
I suppose there were other institutions in Embassytown where the dynamic of the quotidian sustained—some hospitals, perhaps some schools, perhaps houses where shiftparents most deeply loved the children. Whenever any society dies there must be heroes whose fightback is to not change.
Embassytown (2011)
“There’s three ways not to see what you don’t want to,” she told me. “One is the coward’s way and too painful. The other is to close your eyes forever, which is the same as the first, when it comes to it. The third is the hardest and the best: you have to make sure only the things you can afford to see come before you.”
Looking for Jake (2005)
That’s the trouble with trying to counter clichés—the counterclichés cliché quicker than shit off a shovel, and with that comes domestication. Either you lose any subversive gloss at all—the hip-hop which now sells us jeans and cheese once fought the power—or, what’s perhaps worse, a horrible zombie gloss of radicalism is retained while you shuffle into the corridors of establishment, rotting.
But Isaac’s research-unchanged in its aims over all those years-could not proceed in a vacuum. He had to publish. He had to debate. He had to argue, to attend conferences-as the rogue, the rebellious son. There were great advantages to renegacy.
Perdido Street Station (2000)
“I don’t want to be a simile anymore,” I said. “I want to be a metaphor.”
Embassytown (2011)
Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth. It has been night for a long time. The hovels that encrust the river’s edge have grown like mushrooms around me in the dark. We rock. We pitch in a deep current.
Perdido Street Station (2000)
In this city, those who look like me are not like me. I made the mistake once (tired and afraid and desperate for help) of doubting that. Looking for a place to hide, looking for food and warmth at night and respite from the stares that greet me whenever I set foot on the streets.
Perdido Street Station (2000)