# Quote — China Miéville, Three Moments of an Explosion

> Metamorphosis is death. Inside a pupa larval flesh breaks down utterly, as if in chemical spill. Eyes do not become other eyes nor mouthparts mouths. All parts are lost in a reconfiguring slop, as absolutely formless as a salted slug, that ex liquid nihilo self-organizes into a quite other animal. A cocoon is not a transformation pod but an execution chamber, one that doubles as a birthplace, and is parsimonious with matter.

- Author: [China Miéville](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville.md)
- Book: [Three Moments of an Explosion](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/three-moments-of-an-explosion.md)
- Page: 104
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/China_Mi%C3%A9ville#Three_Moments_of_an_Explosion_(2015)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/three-moments-of-an-explosion/metamorphosis-is-death

## More from this book

> “So what’s your alternative?” people say, as if that’s logic. We don’t have to have an alternative, that’s not how critique works. We may do, and if we do, you’re welcome, but if we don’t 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 labour. Than does the millennially paced rage of the steepening shelf of the benthic plain for a system imposed by the cruelest and most crass hydrothermal vent, if that anemone-crusted angle of descent does not propose a submerged lake of black salt.

p. 215 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/three-moments-of-an-explosion/so-whats-your.md)

> Lists make magic, the rhythm of itemized words: you do not list ten techniques, numbered and chantable, in austere prose appropriate for some early-millennium rebooted Book of Thoth, and not know that you have written an incantation.

p. 102 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/three-moments-of-an-explosion/lists-make-magic.md)

> Abomination from one perspective, it was advertising copy from another.

p. 102 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/china-mieville/three-moments-of-an-explosion/abomination-from-one.md)