China Mieville Quotes

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life.

There were a thousand secrets in her eyes, a thousand wounds. A lifetime of distrust and betrayal. Isolation. How did one overcome such things?

You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people, but until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them.

When the wound/ No longer hurts/ The scar does.

And be grateful. Our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real.

...A scar signifies past pain, a wound that did not heal as it ought. But it testifies, too, to survival...(Here be Dragons)

You can always forgive, you just can't really forget.

Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

A scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

There are some hurts that we experience that can be forgiven but we won't forget them.

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.

Lie beside me. Let me see the division of your pores. Let me see the web of scars made by your family's claws and you their furniture. Let me see the wounds that they denied. The battle ground of family life that has been your body. Let me see the bruised red lines that signal their encampment. Let me see the routed place where they are gone. Lie beside me and let the seeing be healing. No need to hide. No need for either darkness or light. Let me see you as you are.

I have some scars... lots of internal ones. But they're all scabbed over.

What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?

An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.

When we forgive someone, we do not forget the hurtful act, as if forgetting came along with the forgiveness package, the way strings come with a violin. Begin with the basics. If you forget, you will not forgive at all. You can never forgive people for things you have forgotten about. You need to forgive precisely because you have not forgotten what someone did; your memory keeps the pain alive long after the hurt has stopped. Remembering is the storage of pain. It is why you need to be healed in the first place.

Bones mend. Regret stays with you forever.

By God, I shall spend the rest of my life getting my heart back, healing and forgetting every scar you put upon me when I was a child. The first move I ever made, after the cradle, was to crawl for the door, and every move I have made since has been an effort to escape.

There's a lot of wounded people out there who don't believe that there's any way they'll ever be healed from those wounds.

All of us heal in time. The strongest are born again. We only keep the scars we choose to keep.

Without memory, there is no healing. Without forgiveness, there is no future.

Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones.

What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?