20 quotes
"Art’s something you choose to make … it’s a bringing together of … of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person."
Perdido Street Station (2000)
We say: towards an all-race union against the bosses!
Perdido Street Station (2000)
Mercantile law ruled: let the buyer beware.
Perdido Street Station (2000)
We say: votes for all and vote for change!
Perdido Street Station (2000)
The lamp was a beacon, a lighthouse in that forbidding city, steering the wyrman’s way over the river and out of the predatory night.
Perdido Street Station (2000)
An abstract individual is a garuda who forgot, for some time, that he or she is part of a larger unit, and owes respect to all the other choosing individuals.
Perdido Street Station (2000)
She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.
Perdido Street Station (2000)
The sun shifted above them, sending shadows of the window-pane and clouds moving uneasily through the room. The lovers did not notice the day move.
Perdido Street Station (2000)
There was no chance at all he would see her, in that labyrinth of dubious experiments, where the nature of the research made even the architecture untrustworthy.
Perdido Street Station (2000)
Lin realized that she was living in an unsustainable realm. It combined sanctimony, decadence, insecurity and snobbery in a weird, neurotic brew. It was parasitic.
Perdido Street Station (2000)
She was an outsider. Had left her sisters. Forgotten hive and moiety.
Perdido Street Station (2000)
The winds of this city are a more melancholy breed. They explore like lost souls, looking in at dusty gaslit windows. We are brethren, the city-winds and I. We wander together.
Perdido Street Station (2000)
Isaac was still piqued by the ignorance surrounding watercraeft. It brought home to him, again, how much mainstream science was bunk, how much "analysis" was just, description-often bad description-hiding behind obfuscatory rubbish.
Perdido Street Station (2000)
Smoke and grime built up in the air until the train seemed to ride on a smog tide. The sounds of industry increased. The train flew through clutches of vast, sparse chimneys like blasted trees as the train passed through Sunter.
Perdido Street Station (2000)
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)
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)
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)
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)