This Census-Taker

China Miéville

Top 10 Best Quotes

“He said, You'll write it not because there's no possibility it'll be found but because it costs too much to not write it.”

“You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won't be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.”

“Once I said to my father, 'Why do you want me?' I still think that's the bravest thing I've ever done.”

“A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but when her foot falls it meets the ground right on the other side. A bridge is just better than no bridge but its horizon is gaplessness, and the fact of itself should still shame it.”

“These felt very much like last moments.”

“The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing.”

“I hoped the hunter would come. I imagined him pushing through the thickets in the foothills. I've thought of him like that often since, as if he's still out there, game in his sights, intending to check on me on his return.”

“the second book’s for readers, he said. But you can’t know when they’ll come, if they do. It’s the book for telling: no code for that one. But—he counted one again and had my close attention—you can still use it to tell secrets and send messages. Even so. You could say them right out, but you can hide them in the words too, in their letters, in the ordering on lines, the arrangements and rhythms.”

“almanacs, or what was left of them when those pages making incorrect predictions and offering unhelpful advice had been torn out.”

“You told all this to the people in the town,” he said. “They said they can’t do anything because of no proof.”

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Book Keywords:

powerlessness, feelings, autobiography, writing, unread, chance, rescuers, identity, family-of-origin, foster-care, bridges, grubs, social-workers, fathers-and-daughters, parents-and-children, terror, storytelling, writers, endings, words, civil-servants, compulsions, failure, journaling, manager, memoir, fathers-and-sons, last-moments, reading, private-thoughts