‘They were worldsick, as meaning yawed. Anything was anything, now. Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable. They could be mythologers now: they’d never had monsters, but now the world was all chimeras, each metaphor a splicing. They city’s a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city were sutured into a third thing, a hearths city, and cities are heart-stained, and hearts are city-stained too.’
Embassytown, China Miéville
Absence Club 