China Miéville, Kraken
12 quotes
"I know, I know," Moore said. "Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean something else?" Shook his head. "What an awfully arrogant thing. What if faiths are exactly what they are? And mean exactly what they say?" "Stop trying to make sense of it and just listen," Dane said."And what," Moore said, "if a large part of the reason they're so tenacious is that they're perfectly accurate?"
"We should have just killed him, that's a lesson, don't get creative with revenge"
"The bullets are gun-eggs,” Collingswood said to Baron, looking at Vardy. Farmers squeezing their holy metal beasts to percussive climax, fertilisation by cordite expulsion, violent ovipositors. Seeking warm places full of nutrients, protecting baby guns deep in the bone cages, until they hatched."
"Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists."
"Of all the skills necessary for her work, what she was perhaps worst at was being polite to inanimate things."
"A few mad exaggerations, alright, within a couple of days: swear to fucking god, they were like throwing grenades and pulling out all kinds of crazy knackery, it was out of control. Whatever. As if the story, if big enough, reflected glory on the teller."
"How do you...? What is it you're doing?" he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutitive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense.Vardy even smiled. "Paranoid," he said. "Theology."
"Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children."
"He was back in the water, not braving but frowning, synchronised swimming, not swimming but sinking, toward the godsquid he knew was there, tentacular fleshscape and the moon-sized eye that he never saw but knew, as if the core of the fucking planet was not searing metal but mollusc, as if what we fall toward when we fall, what the apple was heading for when Newton's head got in the way, was kraken."
"My Google-fu is strong."
"That's what gets converts these days," Baron said. "It's a buyers' market in apocalypse. What's hot in heresy's Armageddon."
"But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse."