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The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2) QUOTES

The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2) QUOTES

1 " Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

2 " In time, in time they tell me, I'll not feel so bad. I don't want time to heal me. There's a reason I'm like this.
I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won't smooth you away.
I can't say goodbye. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

3 " In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

4 " A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.
It has been given many names. Each inlet and bay and stream has been classified as if it were discrete. But it is one thing, where borders are absurd. It fills the space between stones and sand, curling around coastlines and filling trenches between the continents. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

5 " This gentleman is cactus,” said Doul. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

6 " If the fucking Scar exists,” whispered the Brucolac, still without turning, “and if they get us there and by some gods-fucked miracle we survive, then they’ll still destroy us. We are not an expeditionary force; we are not on some fucking quest. This is a city, Uther. We live; we buy; we sell; we steal; we trade. We are a port. This is not about adventures.” He turned and faced Uther Doul with his eyes caustic. “You know that. That’s why you came here, dammit, Uther. Because you were sick of adventures. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

7 " Vessels knocked together for hour upon hour, like bones, like someone infinitely stupid and patient at the door of an empty house. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

8 " Of course you didn’t volunteer the information, or even damn well admit it. But shit, Uther, I came to you and confronted you with what I’d worked out, and you … Well, you’re too professional to give away anything that could come back to bite you, but if you’d wanted to mislead me or leave me thinking I was wrong you could have. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

9 " In time, in time they tell me, I’ll not feel so bad. I don’t want time to heal me. There’s a reason I’m like this. I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won’t smooth you away. I can’t say good-bye. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

10 " 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 of whispers. Each link has an imperfect join with those around it, and meaning leaches out between them.” If "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

11 " Sometimes he opened books and found words that had defeated him the first time he had seen them, and that he had then written down and learned. It delighted him. He felt like a fox that had tracked them. That was how it was with thorough, and climber, and khepri. When he encountered them for the second time, they surrendered to him, and he read them without pause. In "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

12 " Rude creatures emit slime and phosphorescence and move with flickerings of unclear limbs. The logic of their forms derives from nightmares. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

13 " For every action, there's an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers - and one comes true. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

14 " He is unable to think in words. The shells begin once again to pound the water around him, to make it into a bloody broth of metal and the dead. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

15 " Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

16 " Everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

17 " It had not been a long journey, but the memory of it filled her like an infection. She had felt tethered by time to the city behind her, so that the minutes stretched out taut as she moved away, and slowed the farther she got, dragging out her little voyage. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

18 " Cooking and eating were growing to irritate her with their relentless necessity. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

19 " So many truths have been kept from me. This violent, pointless voyage has been sopping with blood. I feel thick and sick with it. And that is all: contingent and brutal without meaning. There is nothing to be learnt here. No ecstatic forgetting. There is no redemption in the sea. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)

20 " She was Remade she was (Remade scum), he knew it, he saw it, and still he felt incessantly what was inside him, and he felt a great scab of habit and prejudice split from him, part from his skin where his homeland had inscribed him deep. [...]There was a caustic pain as he peeled off a clot of old life and exposed himself open and unsure to her, to new air. [...] His feelings welled out and bled together (their festering ceased) and they began to resolve, to heal in a new form, to scar. "

― China Miéville , The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2)