Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

I walked outside, into the welter of the stinging water, the gusting pockets of wind.

But what was endurance and shared diminishment if not devotion?

I marveled at the fact that I had been given such a gift: not just to lose myself in the present moment so utterly but also to have such solitude, which was all I had ever craved

I remember you, Saul. I remember the keeper of the light.

Think about how backstory fits the tale you're trying to tell... p.195

The hairline cracks pushing out from that space resembled the roots of a plant.

We knew that members of the second expedition to Area X had committed suicide by gunshot and members of the third had shot each other.

The air trickling out of his mouth like a series of tiny lies about the world that had decided to extinguish him.

I tell him the Company is the past preying on the future—that we are the future.

I never had a country, never had the choice; I was born into one.

We were meant to be focused on our purpose, and "anything personal should be left behind." Names belonged to where we had come from, not to who we were while embedded in Area X.

I remember thinking that I might be talking to the animals by the next morning. I might be rolling in the dirt, laughing hysterically under that merciless blue sky. Or I might find the brightness rising curious out of the top of my head, like a periscope—independent and lively, with nothing left beneath it but a husk.

wanted—I needed—to know that I had indeed seen him, not some apparition conjured up by the Crawler, and I clutched at anything that would help me believe that. What convinced me the most wasn't the photograph—it was the sample the anthropologist had taken from the edge of the Crawler, the sample that had proven to be human brain tissue.

But rather than looking forward to reading that account, I felt as if I were stealing a private diary that had been locked by his death.

A faint pulse of red light blinked on and off, too high to be coming from anything other than a container ship. But too irregular to be anything but handheld or jury-rigged. In the right location on the horizon to be coming from Failure Island, perhaps from the ruined lighthouse. Blinking out a code he didn't recognize, a message from Henry that he didn't want to receive.

You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what's left to you. When

The psychologist had said, "The border is advancing Ã¢â'¬Â¦ a little bit more every year." But I found that statement too limiting, too ignorant. There were thousands of "dead" spaces like the lot I had observed, thousands of transitional environments that no one saw, that had been rendered invisible because they were not "of use.

Cultural indigestion, I tell you, the gripe in the bowels of your spirit.

his head burst in a blizzard of seeds that hung in the lamplight and drifted slowly to the ground like a tiny division of poison paratroopers.

Anonymity amongst the wreckage of the earth. This is what I sought. And a good pair of boots for when it got cold.

Writing a book and going underground are so similar. That fear of the unknown never really goes away. But, after a while, it becomes a perverse comfort

Although nothing has yet come out of the sea, from the ruined village figures have emerged and headed for the Tower.

then in that moment that I'd begun to love him. Because he didn't see the world like I saw the world. He didn't see the traps. Because he made me rethink even simple words like disgusting or beautiful.

The trees are as sullen as ever, looking like hunched-over priests with long beards of moss, or as Grace says, less respectfully, "Like a line of used-up old drug addicts.