The Romanovian method becomes one of appointing adventurer after incompetent after nonentity to grand offices of state. The liberals and the sharper-witted right grow ever more apoplectic.
That, she says, is what I am. I am what’s been sent for.
Same weather over here as back home, I said.
October, for an instant, brings a new kind of power. Fleetingly, there is a shift towards workers’ control of production and the rights of peasants to the land. Equal rights for men and women in work...
It’s a chain of whispers, he said. He leaned in and spoke quietly, ensuring that our conversation was private. When they tell you that I came from the world of the dead, you’re at the end of a chain o...
In the streets of Un Lun Dun: a group of a girl, a half ghost, a talking book, a piece of rubbish, and two living words was unusual but not very.
I was too abstract. I was not worthy of respect. There…was a madness…I was mad. I committed a heinous act, a heinous act… His words broke down into avian moans. What did you do? Isaac steeled himself...
I share the streets with aimlessly moving scraps of paper and little whirlwinds of dust, with motes that pass like erratic thieves under eaves and through doors.
I paid it nuts, Billy. What would you think I'd pay a squirrel?
I have mixed feelings about zoos. Some days, it makes me sad to see animals in confined habitats, under constant observation by an alien species. Other days, I see the amount of care and love provided...
I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society’s usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level.
His manager taught him that words change with time, by single letters or more, sometimes their whole roots switching—a y to an e in a name for power, sun-writing becomes light-drawing. The man eventua...
He said, You’ll write it not because there’s no possibility it’ll be found but because it costs too much to not write it.
Easiest way is to bend over and say ‘car.
Be a dilettante, a sciolist, a swindler … So long as you return me to the sky, Grimnebulin.
And I who months before had run into town screaming my accusation was shy to say it now that I was asked to put it in clear words. I’d grown used to this world in which everyone knew what had happened...
But I do think it's important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books.
Sometimes-guns, that violently assert the manchmal, this stuff, our everyday, against the always of the immer.
Common form of establishment, for much of Besźel’s history, had been the DöplirCaffé: one Muslim and one Jewish coffeehouse, rented side by side, each with its own counter and kitchen, halal and koshe...
What you up to, Isaac? They’re so egalitarian . . . well . . . Their society’s all based on maximizing choice for the individual, which is why they’re communistic. Grants the most uninhibited choice t...