“Bellis gasped.Everywhere lights where suspended. Globes of cold illumination like frost moons, with no trace of the sepia of the New Crobuzon's gaslamps. The city glowed in the darkening water like a net full of ghostly lights.The outer edges of the city were low buildings in porous stone and coral.”

“New Crobuzon was a city unconvinced by gravity.”

“There was no moon but the night sky was a riot of crisp and glittering autumn stars. There were streetlights too and lights on buildings and on bridges which looked like earthbound stars and they glimmered repeated as they were reflected with the city in the night water of the Thames. It’s fairyland thought Richard.”

“The city was dark except for the building lights that seemed to appear like sores - like bandaids had been ripped off to expose the city's skin.”

“The train might just as well have been a plane, something with wings. I felt suspended above everything: the city, time, the hard, cold edges of the world. It was fleeing, but it's a memory I can still feel.”

“The sky lay over the city like a map showing the strata of things and the big full moon toppled over in a furrow like the abandoned wheel of a gun carriage on a sunset field of battle and the shadows walked like cats and I looked into the white and ghostly interior of things and thought of you and I looked on their structural outsides and thought of you and was lonesome.”