China Mieville Quotes

I look for ghosts; but none will force Their way to me. 'Tis falsely said That there was ever intercourse Between the living and the dead.

I'm quite an untidy person in a lot of ways. But order makes me happy. I have to have a clear desk and a tidy desktop, with as few visual distractions as possible. I don't mind sound distractions, but visual ones freak me out.

If we don't know life, how can we know death?

The living are more important than the dead.

The dead sleep in their moonless night; my business is with the living.

A life lived in chaos is an impossibility.

Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live.

Since the Creator had made the facts of the after-life inaccessible to man, He must not have required that man understand death in order to live fruitfully.

In order to die, you must first have lived.

The dead are the only people to have permanent dwellings.

Nothing is orderly till man takes hold of it. Everything in creation lies around loose.

I have good hope that there is something remaining for the dead.

Death then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live if we cannot bear to die.

There are so many ways to be alive, but only one way to be dead.

How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive.

I'm possibly a very morbid person but I think about death a lot. I don't know if it's maybe from being on films that's often playing Harry [Potter] or I just think it's a natural thing that I have. It's something that I think about just because it's fascinating in a very alien kind of way.

In fact living is dying.

Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.

Actually, I have only two things to worry about now: afterlife and reincarnation.

Do you believe in an afterlife?" the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate. Brown nodded. "I think this is it.

(Socrates) said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born.

This world is the land of the dying; the next is the land of the living.

Perhaps we clutch at life only when we have never lived or trusted it. Then death seems the last and greatest defeat, the end of something never felt.

Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.