“Well, sometimes," Dane said, "Just because someone uses something wrong doesn't mean it's useless.”

“I know, I know," Moore said. "Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean something else?" Shook his head. "What an awfully arrogant thing. What if faiths are exactly what they are? And mean exactly what they say?" "Stop trying to make sense of it and just listen," Dane said."And what," Moore said, "if a large part of the reason they're so tenacious is that they're perfectly accurate?”

“Dane discarded his speargun with visible relief. As a paladin of the Church of God Kraken, he had few options. Like many groups devoid of real power and realpolitik, the church was actually constrained by its aesthetics. Its operatives could not have guns, simply, because guns were not squiddy enough.It was a common moan. Drunk new soldiers of the Cathedral of the Bees might whine: “It’s not that I don’t think sting-tipped blowpipes aren’t cool, it’s just…” “I’ve gotten rally good with the steam-cudgel,” a disaffected Pistonpunk might ask her elders “but wouldn’t it be useful to…?” Oh for a carbine, devout assassins pined.”

“The sounds aren’t where the meaning lives. […]Their language is organised noise, like all of ours are, but for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen. […]When they speak they do hear the soul in each voice. That’s how the meaning lives there. The words have got . . .” He shook his head, hesitating, then just using that religiose term. “Got the soul in them. And it has to be there, the meaning. Has to be true to be Language.”

“Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.”

“If I program ’ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it,” Scile said. “If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it’s only sound, and that’s not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.”

“I've no interest in this city. I do not want to live in a curio, Johannes. This is a sideshow! This is something to scare the children! 'The Floating Pirate City'! I don't want it! I don't want to live in this great bobbing parasite, like some fucking pondskater sucking the victims dry. This isn't a city, Johannes; it's a parochial little village less than a mile wide, and I do not want it."I was always going to return to New Crobuzon. I would never wish to see out my days outside it. It's dirty and cruel and difficult and dangerous—particularly for me, particularly now—but it's my home. Nowhere else in the world has the culture, the industry, the population, the thaumaturgy, the languages, the art, the books, the politics, the history … New Crobuzon," she said slowly, "is the greatest city in Bas-Lag."And coming from her, someone without any illusions about New Crobuzon's brutality, or squalor, or repression, the declamation was far more powerful than if it came from any Parliamentarian."And you're telling me," she said finally, "that I've been exiled from my city—for life—because of you?”