Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

Whitby's often silent, and when he speaks his questions and concerns do nothing to alleviate the pressure of that gloom, the sense of intent eternal and everlasting that occupies this stretch of land, that predates Area X. The still, standing water, the oppressive blackness of a sky in which the blue peers down through the trees at startling intervals, only to be taken away again, and only ever seeming to come to you from a thousand miles off anyway.

The impatient, feckless reader, posessed of no glimmer of intellectual or historical curiosity, should do an old historian a favor and skip the next few pages, proceeding directly to the Silence itself (Part III). I would assume that, in these horrid modern times, that will include most of you. Of course, those readers least likely to read these footnotes, and thus least likely to appreciate the next few pages, will skip this note and bore themselves upon the ennui of history .

She had a nice laugh, even when she was using it as a weapon against him.

Can you really imagine what it was like in those first moments, peering down into that dark space, and seeing that? Perhaps you can. Perhaps you're staring at it right now.

There was a tear in the sleeve of her blouse. Her pink nail polish had chipped. Details were escaping her. I sympathized.

My loneliness began to be filled with ghosts. That is the worst thing about loneliness, how easily it becomes filled.

that as a kind of trap, a way to become distracted Ã¢â'¬Â¦ and still the sense that whatever will disorient and destabilize lies below you, deciding whether to be seen or remain unseen—around a corner, beyond the horizon, and with each new empty reveal, each curve of the steps lit by the blue flames of dead words, toward an unknown become shy, you are wound ever tighter, even though there is nothing to be seen.

Don't thank people for giving you what you should already have

Courage is no more than learning to live with your fear.

Hadn't the hummingbird been a kind of miracle? Hadn't it diminished us not to see this as a miracle and protect it?

The linguist still believed in the superstition of logic

Annihilation!" she shrieked at me, flailing in confusion. "Annihilation! Annihilation!" The word seemed more meaningless the more she repeated it, like the cry of a bird with a broken wing.

Hellooo Pelican, come in, come in? No? Okay. You just be that way, you petulant bird.

But you're curious, too," she said. "Why do you say that?" "You guard the light. And light sees everything.

This machine or creature or some combination of both that can manipulate molecules, that can store energy where it will, that can hide the bulk of its intent and its machinations from us. That lives with angels within it and with the vestiges of its own terroir, the hints of its homeland, to which it can never return because it no longer exists.

There might be life, right under our noses. But there's always been life right under our noses – we're just too blind to see it. These fucking questions – they don't matter.

Here's a question I've gotten like 5 times this year. "I haven't read your books yet. Are they any good?" No, I only write shitty books. I love to spend a lot of time writing intricately shitty books and then being painfully truthful about the crapulous product of my shitty labor.

The only solution to the environment is neglect, which requires our collapse." A sentence the biologist had excised from her thesis, but one that had burned bright in her mind, and now in Ghost Bird's, where, even analyzed and kept at arm's length like all received memories, it had a kind of power.

This was really the only thing I discovered in him after his return: a deep and unending solitude, as if he had been granted a gift that he didn't know what to do with. A gift that was poison to him and eventually killed him. But would it have killed me?

We're astronauts. All of the expedition members have been astronauts.

Always that riptide compulsion dragging you down into the water, that need to know overriding the fear.

Nothing that lived and breather was truly objective-even in a vaccum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.

Perhaps, too, hesitance overtakes me because when I think of writing I glimpse the world I left behind.

I aimed my flashlight at the ground—and leapt back, gasping. Incredibly, a human face seemed to be rising out of the earth.