Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

and one hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of jelly beans cascaded down on the expresstrip.

God's love shines on anyone who understands the limits of endurance, and allows forgiveness

a glorified spade.

Area X, before the ill-defined Event that locked it behind the border thirty years ago and made it subject to so many inexplicable occurrences, had been part of a wilderness that lay adjacent to a military base.

The pointlessness of that, the pressure of that, almost got to me again. The waste of it all.

They found what some might call a preternatural silence.

Never skip a step. Skip a step, you'll find five more new ones waiting ahead of you.

Because more and more in the modern Internet era you came across isolated instances of a mind virus or worm: brains that self-washed, bathed in received ideologies that came down from on high, ideologies that could remain dormant or hidden for years, silent as death until they struck.

Some things remain mysterious even if you think about them all the time.

The things that disturb us at midnight are negligible at 9 a.m.

But I was not a domesticated animals...The dirt and grit of a city, the unending wakefulness of it, the crowdedness, the constant light obscuring the stars, the omnipresent gasoline fumes, the thousand ways it presaged our destruction... none of these things appealed to me.

You won't have nightmares any more when you grow up.' I solemnly believed this. He looked at me levelly, and said softly, 'When I grow up, I'm going to kill you.' His smile slowly came out then, like the sun in a winter cloud. In my memory, the sentence stretches, and seems to be said a hundred times not quite at once. That sentence has its own particular, special moment in time, which lasts until now.

The snow came quickly, white hornets stinging in the thin atmospheric night.

I think now, so late, too late, of the neighbor's lawn service, using leaf blowers to release herbicide all over their lovely roses. How all of that invisible death didn't disappear into the air. How it coated us, all of us, and that holding pond. How it masked us from ourselves. How it shone through us and we didn't even know it.

the low sun white and cold, and full of worms. Then a fan of white, gelatinous rays, transparent tubes whose ends mouth the earth. A flat, white opening in the sky, whose light silvered the air, dotted with their shadows. They are the larvae of the sun and will become themselves stars.

I'd wake in the morning, my head fuzzy, sometimes with someone I knew but who was a stranger just leaving, and realize I was one day closer to the end of it all.

the idea that somehow any of that will keep out the darkness, keep out the thoughts that churn through your head—the cold regard that holds you as if God herself had through some electrified beatific gaze pinned you like a butterfly in a collector's display case of mediocrity.

your antagonist is a hero in their own mind... p.192

The gun is a magic instrument, converting children to numbers.

Even though no threat had revealed itself, it seemed important to eliminate any possible moment of silence. As if somehow the blankness of the walls fed off of silence, and that something might appear in the spaces between our words if we were not careful. Had I expressed this anxiety to the psychologist, she would have been worried, I know. But I was more attuned to solitude than any of us, and I would have characterized that place in that moment of our exploration as watchful.

No one, not even Wick, knew why the Company hadn't seen the day coming when Mord would transform from their watchdog to their doom - why they hadn't destroyed Mord while they still held that power. Now it was too late, for not only had Mord become a behemouth but by some magic of engineering extorted from the company, he had learned to levitate, to fly.

The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is in deplorable condition. Those monumental rocks, once enveloped in eternal night, are lit up now, and to make matters worse, every crag is carved with initials and monograms.

Something had sharpened her, and he thought it might be memory.

But I was not a domesticated animal. The dirt and grit of a city, the unending wakefulness of it, the crowdedness, the constant light obscuring the stars, the omnipresent gasoline fumes, the thousand ways it presaged our destruction... none of these things appealed to me.