Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by China Miéville

Quote by China Miéville

Work

Railsea

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

China Miéville

Browse famous quotes and profile details for China Miéville. more

You May Also Like

“I felt that it was unfair that my lack of a few pounds of flesh should deprive me of a chance at a good job but I had long ago emotionally rejected the world in which I lived and my reaction was: Well, this is the system by which people want the world to run whether it helps them or not. To me, my losing was only another manifestation of that queer, material way of American living that computed everything in terms of the concrete: weight, color, race, fur coats, radios, electric refrigerators, cars, money ... It seemed that I simply could not fit into a materialistic life.”

“New Adult is a label that is condescending to readers and authors alike. It implies that the books act as training wheels between Young Adult and Adult. For the New Adult books that are particularly childish, the label implies that they are a step above Young Adult--which is insulting to the Young Adult books that are far superior. For the New Adult books that are particularly sophisticated, the label implies that they are not worthy of being considered "adult." It's a lose-lose situation for everyone. [...] Therefore, the new genre of New Adult is a large step backwards. It increases the system of categories and labels even further, and prevents readers from expanding their horizons and minds. The term is reductive and it is insulting to its own audience.”

“The desire to categorize humans along racial lines, and the impulse to superpose attributes such as intelligence (or criminality, creativity, or violence) on those lines, illustrates a general theme concerning genetics and categorization. Like the English novel, or the face, say, the human genome can be lumped and split in a million different ways. But whether to split or lump, to categorize or synthesize, is a choice. ... The narrower the definition of the heritable feature or the trait, the more likely we will find a genetic locus for that trait, and the more likely we will find that the trait will segregate within some human sub-population.”