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1 " It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth. "
― China Miéville , Embassytown
2 " If I program ’ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it,” Scile said. “If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it’s only sound, and that’s not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it. "
3 " Sometimes translation stops you understanding. "
4 " We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns.You have never spoken before. "
5 " Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on. "
6 " Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth. "
7 " I needed to be alone for whatever would happen. I knew that something would as certainly as if this were a last chapter. "
8 " I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice... "
9 " A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation? "
10 " You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts. "
11 " Hello slash query is all well? parenthesis enquiry after suitability of timing slash insinuations of warmness sixty percent insinuations of belief that interlocutor has topic to be discussed forty percent blah blah.” I raised an eyebrow. “It was pointless. "
12 " No existe nada igual en ningún sitio -dijo -. En ningún sitio. No se trata de los sonidos. No es en los sonidos donde vive el significado. "
13 " Walls and ceilings moved with ratcheting mechanical life like the offspring of chains and crabs. "
14 " A Kedis troika approached afterward, colourcells winking in their frills, and the shemale speaker thanked him in her curious diction, shaking his hand with her prehensile genitalia. "
15 " sometimes-guns, that violently assert the manchmal, this stuff, our everyday, against the always of the immer. "
16 " Oratees are addicts. Strung out on an Ambassador’s Language. "
17 " staggering out of Language, into language "
18 " As autom, Ehrsul had neither rights nor tasks, but so far as it was understood an owner, a settler of some previous generation, had died intestate, and she’d never become anyone else’s property. There were variants of salvage laws by which someone might theoretically have tried to claim her, but by now it would have seemed abominable. "
19 " I was bad at money but had amassed some. I couldn’t claim that marriage was my real skill, but I was better at it than many. I’d had two previous husbands and a wife. I’d lost them to changes of predilection, without rancour—as I say, I wasn’t bad at marriage. Scile was my fourth spouse. "
20 " Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on. "
