China Mieville Quotes

It's interesting when you've been a partner with someone for so long. So now to sing solo and starting all over again I am learning that I am more bodacious than I thought. I don't know where it's coming from but I am glad.

After you married, Crispin, she said, my heart was broken. I will not deny it. But I did not slip into a sort of suspended life that would be forever gray and meaningless if you did not somehow come back to me. I put back the pieces of my heart and kept on living. I am not the woman I was when I was in love with you and expecting to marry you. I am not the woman I was when I heard that you were married. I am the woman I have become in the five years since then, and she is a totally different person. I like her. I wish to continue living her life.

Shaking the past, making my break, taking control, that's what it takes.

I am free now to detach myself from what used to be.

I didn't like where I once was, so I promised myself I wouldn't be back there.

There are points in your life, especially if you have creative ambitions, where selfishness is necessary.

Don't change for nobody.

I'm responsible for what I am and what I want to be. I'm not trying to live by another's standards.

People tell you the world looks a certain way. Parents tell you how to think. Schools tell you how to think. TV. Religion. And then at a certain point, if you're lucky, you realize you can make up your own mind. Nobody sets the rules but you. You can design your own life.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

I went to find myself and save myself by being an agent.

I knew that if-God forbid-anything ever happened in my life, I needed to know how to take care of myself.

Your life is yours and yours alone. Rise up and live it.

One of my favorite feelings is the sense I get from pouring over parts of my past before lighting them up and leaving it all behind me to start over again.

Leaving things behind and starting again is a way of coping with difficulties. I learnt very early in my life that I was able to leave a place and still remain myself.

My life choices are not supposed to be the gateway to somebody else's. That's my journey.

I'm ready to live on my own. It's a really big step, but I'm ready.

I want to be in a position where I can function as a human being.

I guess I'm in a state of becoming. Even though I've had a full career and I've been around a long time, it's like dinosaurs are coming back. It's all new. I'm having to be on my own and seeing how exciting life can be now.

In silence - and in self-defense - I figured things out in my own little way.

I had to find the courage to turn my life around.

Since being quite young, I've had a very strong sense of independence and survival. As a child, I was on my own two feet emotionally.

I've learnt to take care of myself.

I had no real education because I was in and out of schools so I decided that I would completely change my look, change my image, change my name and move to New York.

But egoism is more than this. It is the realization by the individual that he is above all institutions and all formulas; that they exist only so far as he chooses to make them his own by accepting them.