Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

None of us are changing. Everything is fine. Let's have a picnic.

For some reason, Area X was very hard on linguists, almost as hard as it was on priests.

Topological anomaly? Topological anomaly? Don't you mean witchcraft ? Don't you mean the end of civilisation? Don't you mean some kind of spooky thing that we know nothing, absolutely fucking nothing about, to go with everything else we don't know?

In truth, some demons were once people who did bad things even though they knew better. In truth, people were demons when they didn't know any better. The girl had learned that it hardly mattered in the end

precision in gardens was too much like turning a wolf on the prowl into a pug with an embroidered ruffle for a collar. She much preferred the wolf.

And one day, out of Heaven knows what material, he spun the beast a wonderful name, and from that moment it grew into a god and a religion. The Woman indulged in religion once a week at a church near by, and took Conradin with her, but to him the church service was an alien rite in the House of Rimmon. Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the tool-shed, he worshipped with mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wooden hutch where dwelt Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret.

And so all of these thoughts overwhelmed me when I woke from my hiding place in an alley the next morning, having slept on garbage and filth, to find it — wearing a large gray hat, small as a child but with the wizened features of something already dead — staring down at me.

That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated shall walk the world in a bliss of not-knowing Ã¢â'¬Â¦

Already his wings were burning up and he felt more like some ponderous moaning creature trapped in the mire.

in death, he is not even the ghost he was in life.

the atmosphere of the town was an artificial creation whose existence relied on the subtle attentions of its inhabitants.

There simply aren't enough constitutional safeguards in place to protect against a rogue president.

Cross-pollination and 'contamination' is really important to the health of fiction, and sometimes it's a literal conversation, too, in that writers who might never otherwise meet and talk do so because of our anthologies.

There are a lot of human-created systems that we like to tout as being logical that are actually riddled with illogic. And then, on the other hand, we have all these natural systems that are not conscious, but they are logical, and they work really well.

Freedom could take you farther from what you sought, not closer.

It was a trivial entertainment piece, capable of neither harm nor good.

Soon after, there comes the crunch of boots, and, disoriented, you shout, 'Annihilation! Annihilation!

No, in the end, easier to tear it down and start over. The soundless scream of social media these days. The system must be destroyed. It can't be fixed. Unitopia must have begun to seem like a Band-Aid applied to a gaping chest wound.

He also got to write a book about whiskey a few years before his death from cancer, which entailed driving around Scotland and sampling the product, engendering perhaps thousands of envious curses from writers around the world.

Perhaps he had even seen it coming from the top of the lighthouse, the Event arriving like a kind of wave. And what had manifested? What do I believe manifested? Think of it as a thorn

What does it mean to enter the mind of the beloved? The I lost in the you without hesitation: the ultimate goal of every kindred soul to transcend the aching, the screaming, loneliness of the Divide, so that the atoms of one dissolve into the atoms of the other (two as one . . .), making such intimate love that orgasm is the sharing of electrons in flight. And what does it mean to enter the mind of the beloved when you believe the beloved no longer loves you?

What's outside the border when you're inside it?" "What's the border when you're inside it?" "What's the border when someone is outside it?" "Why can't the person inside see the person outside?

The hollows of his face, even in that vibrant, late-summer light, make him look haunted by a memory he hasn't had yet.

Think of Area X as a murderer we're trying to catch." "Oh great, that's just great, now we've got a detective on staff, too.