# Perdido Street Station - Author: [China Miéville](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville.md) - Quotes: 43 - Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station ## Quotes > We say: votes for all and vote for change! p. 127 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/we-say-votes.md) > This is what makes the world, Ms. Lin. I believe this to be the fundamental dynamic. Transition. The point where one thing becomes another. It is what makes you, the city, the world, what they are. And that is the theme I’m interested in. The zone where the disparate become part of the whole. The hybrid zone. p. 41 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/this-is-what.md) > We have watched mutant creatures crawl from sewers into cold flat starlight and whisper shyly to each other, drawing maps and messages in faecal mud. > > I have sat with the wind at my side and seen cruel things, wicked things. > > My scars and bonestubs itch. I am forgetting the weight, the sweep, the motion of wings. If I were not garuda I would pray. But I will not obeise myself before arrogant spirits. p. 58 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/we-have-watched.md) > 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. p. 58 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/the-winds-of-this.md) > We say: towards an all-race union against the bosses! p. 127 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/we-say-towards.md) > She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care. p. 36 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/she-was-intelligent.md) > You can’t respect other people’s individuality if you focus on your own individuality in a kind of abstract, isolated way. 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 recognizes 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. p. 71 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/you-cant-respect.md) > 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. p. 72 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/an-abstract-individual.md) > If a murderer stalked the mansions of Flag Hill or Canker Wedge, would the militia waste any time or spare resources? Why, no! The hunt for Jack Half-a-Prayer proves it! And yet, when the Eyespy Killer strikes in Smog Bend, nothing happens! Another eyeless victim was fished from the Tar last week-bringing the number killed to five-and not a word from the blue-clad bullies in the Spike. We say: it’s one law for the rich, another for the poor! p. 127 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/if-a-murderer.md) > I think artists have an ambivalent relationship with drugs. I mean, the whole project’s about unlocking the beast within, right? Or the angel. Whatever. Opening doors one thought were jammed closed. Now, if you do that with drugs, then doesn’t that make the art rather a let-down? Art’s got to be about communication, hasn’t it? So if you rely on drugs, which are, I do not care what any proselytizing little ponce dropping a fizzbolt with chums at a dancehall tells me, which are an intrinsically individualized experience, then you’ve opened the doors, but can you communicate what you’ve found on the other side? Then on the other hand, if you remain stubbornly straight-edged, keep sternly to the mind as she is more usually found, then you can communicate with others, because you’re all speaking the same language, as it were… but have you opened the door? Maybe the best you can do is peer through the keyhole. Maybe that’ll do… p. 111 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/i-think-artists.md) > I have taken to foraging alone after nightfall when the city quiets and becomes introspective. I walk as an intruder on its solipsistic dream. I came by darkness, I live by darkness. The savage brightness of the desert is like some legend I heard a long time ago. My existence grows nocturnal. My beliefs change. p. 58 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/i-have-taken.md) > I will ask you to work from life, to produce a model-life-size, I fancy-of me. Very few people see my face, Ms. Lin. A man in my position has to be careful. I’m sure you can understand. If you take this commission I will make you rich, but I will also own a part of your mind. The part that pertains to me. That is mine. I do not give you permission to share it with any. If you do, you will suffer greatly before you die. p. 41 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/i-will-ask.md) > 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. p. 57 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/in-this-city.md) > "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." p. 94 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/arts-something-you.md) > "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." p. 115 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/part-of-you.md) > Sometimes I clamber to the top of the huge, huge towers that teeter like porcupine spines from the city’s hide. Up in the thinner air, the winds lose the melancholy curiosity they have at street level. They abandon their second-floor petulance. Stirred by towers that poke above the host of city light-intense white carbide lamps, smoke-burnished red of lit grease, tallow twinkling, frenetic sputtering gas flare, all anarchic guards against the dark-the winds rejoice and play. I can dig my claws into the rim of a building’s crown and spread my arms and feel the buffets and gouts of boisterous air and I can close my eyes and remember, for a moment, what it is to fly. p. 59 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/sometimes-i-clamber.md) > 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. p. 55 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/the-lamp-was.md) > 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. p. 128 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/smoke-and-grime.md) > 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. p. 13 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/but-isaacs-research-unchanged.md) > 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. p. 217 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/lin-realized-that.md) > He was, after all, the scientist-outcast, the disreputable thinker who walked out of a lucrative teaching post to engage in experiments too outrageous and brilliant for the tiny minds who ran the university. What did he care for convention? He would sleep with whomever and whatever he liked, surely! p. 12 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/he-was-after.md) > The rotting buildings lean against each other, exhausted. The river smears slime on its brick banks, city walls risen from the depths to hold the water at bay. There is a vile stink here. (I wonder how this looks from above, no chance for the city to hide then, if you came at it on the wind you would see it from miles and miles away like a dirty smear, like a slab of carrion thronging with maggots, I should not think like this but I cannot stop now, I could ride the updrafts that the chimneys vent, sail high over the proud towers and shit on the earthbound, ride the chaos, alight where I choose, I must not think like this, I must not do this now, I must stop, not now, not this, not yet.) [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/the-rotting-buildings.md) > She was an artist. Her circle were the libertines, the patrons and the hangers-on, bohemians and parasites, poets and pamphleteers and fashionable junkies. They delighted in the scandalous and the outre. [...] Her love-life was an avant-garde transgression, an art-happening, like Concrete Music had been last season, or ‘Snot Art! the year before that. p. 11 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/she-was-an-artist.md) > 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. p. 19 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/faint-cries-and.md) > 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. p. 217 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/this-was-the.md) > Now what are we looking at right here? What’s bang in the middle? Some people think that’s mathematics there. Fine. But if maths is the study that best allows you to think your way to the centre, what’re the forces you’re investigating? Maths is totally abstract, at one level, square roots of minus one and the like, but the world is nothing if not rigorously mathematical. So this is a way of looking at the world which unifies all the forces: mental, social, physical. p. 168 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/now-what-are.md) > 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. p. 14 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/the-sun-shifted.md) > To cross-love openly would be a quick route to pariah status, rather than the bad-boy chic he had assiduously courted. What scared him was not that the editors of the journals and the chairs of the conferences and the publishers would find out about Lin and him. What scared him was that he be seen not trying to hide it. If he went through the motions of a cover-up, they could not denounce him as beyond the pale. p. 13 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/to-cross-love-openly.md) > My cloak (heavy cloth unfamiliar and painful on my skin) tugs at me and I can feel the weight of my purse. That is what protects me here; that and the illusion I have fostered, the source of my sorrow and my shame, the anguish that has brought me to this great wen, this dusty city dreamed up in bone and brick, a conspiracy of industry and violence, steeped in history and battened-down power, this badland beyond my ken. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/my-cloak-heavy.md) > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/veldt-to-scrub.md) > To take the choice of another … to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to … for all we individuals to have … our choices. p. 692 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/to-take-the.md) > Sweet smoke wafted over the crowd: khepri, mostly, but here and there other races, investigating the statues. They filled the square: fifteen-foot figures of animals and plants and monstrous creatures, some real and some that had never lived, fashioned in brightly coloured khepri-spit. They represented hours and hours of communal labour. [...] To Lin the statues represented dedication and community, and bankrupt imaginations falling back on cod-heroic grandiosity. This was why she lived and ate and spat her art alone. p. 20 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/sweet-smoke-wafted.md) > I see clearly as you, clearer. For you it is undifferentiated. In one corner a slum collapsing, in another a new train with pistons shining, in another a gaudy painted lady below a drab and ancient airship... You must process as one picture. What chaos! Tells you nothing, contradicts itself, changes its story. For me each tiny part has integrity, each fractionally different from the next, until all variation is accounted for, incrementally, rationally. p. 16 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/i-see-clearly.md) > 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. p. 28 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/isaac-was-still.md) > 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. p. 22 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/there-was-no-chance.md) > Mercantile law ruled: let the buyer beware. p. 8 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/mercantile-law-ruled.md) > They had always tried not to think too hard about the rules of their relationship, but the longer they were together the more this strategy of avoidance became impossible. Questions as yet unasked demanded attention. Innocent remarks and askance looks from others, a moment of contact too long in public-a note from a grocer-everything was a reminder that they were, in some contexts, living a secret. Everything was made fraught. They had never said, We are lovers, so they had never had to say, We will not disclose our relationship to all, we will hide from some. But it had been clear for months and months that this was the case. p. 11 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/they-had-always.md) > Behind her, for a moment, the sky was very full: an aerostat droned in the distance; tiny specks lurched erratically around it, winged figures playing in its wake like dolphins round a whale; and in front of them all another train, heading into the city this time, heading for the centre of New Crobuzon, the knot of architectural tissue where the fibres of the city congealed, where the skyrails of the militia radiated out from the Spike like a web and the five great trainlines of the city met, converging on the great variegated fortress of dark brick and scrubbed concrete and wood and steel and stone, the edifice that yawned hugely at the city’s vulgar heart, Perdido Street Station. p. 22 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/behind-her-for.md) > Andrej’s mind, like any sane human’s … was a constantly convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness, the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole. p. 632 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/andrejs-mind-like.md) > Timbers whisper and the wind strokes thatch, walls settle and floors shift to fill space; the tens of houses have become hundreds, thousands; they spread backwards from the banks and shed light from all across the plain. They surround me. They are growing. They are taller and fatter and noisier, their roofs are slate, their walls are strong brick. The river twists and turns to face the city. It looms suddenly, massive, stamped on the landscape. Its light wells up around the surrounds, the rock hills, like bruise-blood. Its dirty towers glow. I am debased. I am compelled to worship this extraordinary presence that has silted into existence at the conjunction of two rivers. It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night. It is not the current which pulls us but the city itself, its weight sucks us in. Faint shouts, here and there the calls of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy like protruding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things, ragged awnings flickering, cobbled mazes in the old town, culs-de-sac, sewers riddling the earth like secular sepulchres, a new landscape of wasteground, crushed stone, libraries fat with forgotten volumes, old hospitals, towerblocks, ships and metal claws that lift cargoes from the water. How could we not see this approaching? What trick of topography is this, that lets the sprawling monster hide behind corners to leap out at the traveller? It is too late to flee. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/timbers-whisper-and.md) > The water here reflects the stars through a stinking rainbow of impurities, effluents and chymical slop, making it sluggish and unsettling. (Oh, to rise above this to not smell this filth this dirt this dung to not enter the city through this latrine but I must stop, I must, I cannot go on, I must.) [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/the-water-here.md) > She was an outsider. Had left her sisters. Forgotten hive and moiety. p. 20 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/she-was-an-outsider.md) > A train whistles as it crosses the river before us on raised tracks. I look to it, to the south and the east, seeing the line of little lights rush away and be swallowed by this nightland, this behemoth that eats its citizens. We will pass the factories soon. Cranes rear from the gloom like spindly birds; here and there they move to keep the skeleton crews, the midnight crews, in their work. Chains swing deadweight like useless limbs, snapping into zombie motion where cogs engage and flywheels turn. Fat predatory shadows prowl the sky. There is a boom, a reverberation, as if the city has a hollow core. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/perdido-street-station/a-train-whistles.md)