Crobuzon Quotes & Sayings

SHUT UP!...PADDLE! — Ridley Pearson

Teafortwo was a wyrman. Barrel-chested creatures like squat birds, with thick arms like a human dwarf's below those ugly, functional wings, the wyrmen ploughed the skies of New Crobuzon. Their hands were their feet, those arms jutting from the bottom of their squat bodies like crows' legs. They could pace a few clumsy steps here and there balancing on their palms, if they were indoors, but they preferred to careen over the city, yelling and swooping and screaming abuse at passers-by. The wyrmen were more intelligent than dogs or apes, but decidedly less than humans. They thrived on an intellectual diet of scatology and slapstick and mimicry, picking names for each other gleaned without understanding from popular songs and furniture catalogues and discarded textbooks they could just about read. Teafortwo's sister, Isaac knew, was called Bottletop; one of his sons Scabies. — China Mieville

We drove for the sheer fun of driving because there wasn't that much money to be made. — Richard Petty

A feminist is a man or woman who already knows for a fact that men and women are qual and wants society to wake up to that fact, so the world can stop operating at half-strength. — Marlo Thomas

If optimism is important, it's because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success. This flies in the face of the elite view that talent is the primary requirement of a good life, but in many cases the difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convince others of our due. We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope! — Alain De Botton

If I hadn't been a singer, I might have been a photographer or an artist. But it's singing I love. I sing all the time, and I feel really good that I've expressed myself. — Annie Lennox

Style is just an impression. Style itself is hollow. Style, its ok style as long as it is part of a language. Style for style itself is just something very hollow. — Alfonso Cuaron

In criticizing, the teacher is hoping to teach. That's all. — Bankei Yotaku

It was really tough as a kid going to a Braves game. It was a guaranteed loss. You're looking at 100 losses a year. I was a huge baseball fan, played it for quite a while. But when '91 happened, with Smoltz and Glavine, it turned around, and I will say it made it pretty sweet. — Brian Baumgartner

Negative thoughts are contagious and they get passed around like a disease. I inoculate myself against the fear of failure. — Bill Foster

[Peabody:] "Bite me."
Though Eve managed to swallow a chuckle at her aide's use of her own standard response to annoyances, she didn't quite make it over McNab's cheerful, "Where? — J.D. Robb

How can we prevent this telescoping of cultures and styles from ending up in kitsch eclecticism, a cool hellenism excluding all critical judgment? — Nicolas Bourriaud

You don't have to be big to be a big leaguer. Look at Phil Rizzuto. He's really small and he's been one of the greatest that ever was. — Nellie Fox

The New Testament called it salvation or enlightenment, the Twelve Step Program called it recovery. The trouble is that most Christians pushed this great liberation off into the next world, and many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self. We have all been the losers, as a result - waiting around for "enlightenment at gunpoint" (death) instead of enjoying God's banquet much earlier in life. — Richard Rohr

It was not a purer realm that loomed vastly over the city. Smokestacks punctured the membrane between the land and the air and disgorged tons of poisonous smog into that upper world as if out of spite. In a thicker, stinking haze just above the rooftops, the detritus from a million low chimneys eddied together. Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt. — China Mieville

I turn away from him and step into the vastness of New Crobuzon, this towering edifice of architecture and history, this complexitude of money and slum, this profane steam-powered god. I turn and walk into the city my home, not bird or garuda, not miserable crossbreed.
I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man. — China Mieville

You always have to challenge yourself or else you get soft. Right? — Diane Kruger

New Crobuzon was a city unconvinced by gravity. — China Mieville

Bellis gasped.
Everywhere lights where suspended. Globes of cold illumination like frost moons, with no trace of the sepia of the New Crobuzon's gaslamps. The city glowed in the darkening water like a net full of ghostly lights.
The outer edges of the city were low buildings in porous stone and coral. — China Mieville

I want you to think on this very hard. They always do what is best for them. Always. And what is best for them, if I am right, is to have you secure somewhere, in their control, making you do work for them. So why do they have you out here, in the world? What else do they want from you, that they get from you being out here? — Susan Adrian