“Why do you think it does work? It’s not as if any of this stuff is true.” “Maybe devils love ritual as much as people do,” she said.

China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris: A Novel [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]

Hermetic quote Mieville The Last Days of New Paris not any stuff true maybe devils love ritual as much as people do

Consider also:

  1. “The devils of Paris would not shut up. They declaimed as they came, in a hundred languages, they hissed and howled descriptions of their hadal cities, and beat their claws on the sigils they wore, of the houses of the pit, and they shouted rather too often to those they hunted and killed that it was from Hell that they came, and so that everyone should be terrified.”
  2. “The poets and artists and philosophers, resistance activists, secret scouts and troublemakers, had become, as they must, soldiers.”
  3. “After the War people said he was different. I, myself, think he was. But I can’t help feeling that with all his gifts he ought to have been doing bigger work. All that Britannic Majesty stuff isn’t my idea of a great man’s career. And Conway was—or should have been—great.”
  4. “Why did we go and perform that ritual around that other oak tree? How does that help us become better human beings?” “Precisely because most people don’t perform rituals around oak trees anymore, and because by performing apparently absurd rituals, you get in touch with something deep in your soul, in the oldest part of yourself, the part closest to the origin of everything.”
  5. “It’s Chung Fu,” Juliana said. “Inner Truth. I know without using the chart, too. And I know what it means.” Raising his head, Hawthorne scrutinized her. He had now an almost savage expression. “It means, does it, that my book is true?” “Yes,” she said. With anger he said, “Germany and Japan lost the war.” “Yes.”