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Book: This Census-Taker
Quotes of Book: This Census-Taker

China Miéville _ This Census-Taker
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.
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China Miéville _ This Census-Taker
The branches dropped shaggy creepers that, when they reached the earth, hardened into roots and pried apart paving.
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China Miéville _ This Census-Taker
The children from the bridge were often waiting there, eyeing me. They congregated by the stump and played a game involving motions as strange as those of worship. To me it looked as if they were feeling the missing bark for handholds, as if it were an expertise of town children that they could climb ghost trees.
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China Miéville _ This Census-Taker
And I who months before had run into town screaming my accusation was shy to say it now that I was asked to put it in clear words. I'd grown used to this world in which everyone knew what had happened or what I said had, in which it had gone from being spoken to being unspoken again, a secret everybody knew. Here I was, hesitating to speak it. I took persuading.
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China Miéville _ This Census-Taker
I didn't move: I had no moving left in me.
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China Miéville _ This Census-Taker
My father didn't look at me. He dropped more stones upon a random-looking cairn. The townspeople were slow to get out of our sight. He waited and watched them and didn't look at me and kept adding to the substance of the hill with the substance of the hill.
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China Miéville _ This Census-Taker
On the hill we used a different, vaguer calendar than the one I've since learned. The seasons ours described-summer, dimming, and winter-were suited to a different place: the mountain had two seasons at most.
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China Miéville _ This Census-Taker
Houses built on bridges are scandals. A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape,
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China Miéville _ This Census-Taker
He didn't know what if anything it was his mother got from his father's company.
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China Miéville _ This Census-Taker
His manager taught him that words change with time, by single letters or more, sometimes their whole roots switching-a "y" to an "e" in a name for power, "sun-writing" becomes "light-drawing." The man eventually gave him this whole other tongue, and he revisited and at last learned from those cuttings about immense foreign wars.
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China Miéville _ This Census-Taker
almanacs, or what was left of them when those pages making incorrect predictions and offering unhelpful advice had been torn out.
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China Miéville _ This Census-Taker
Everything, even the dirt, was poised.
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