Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

it could take days before you knew that a Vegan round was germinating inside you, and weeks before your body began to blossom into death.

Control's mother often seemed to him like a flash of light across a distant night sky.

All of the things that wore you down, even as that was balanced by the electric feeling of being on the side of a border where you knew things no one else knew.

It wasn't true wilderness, was comfortingly close to civilization, but existed just enough apart to create a boundary. This was what most people wanted: to be close to but not part of . They didn't want the fearful unknown of a "pristine wilderness". They didn't want a soulless artificial life, either.

my insides feeling eviscerated

The light at dusk was a low blaze, a brightness.

You never know every part of yourself because you never encounter yourself in all situations.

Hummers evolved high in the Andes Mountains with progressive colonization of lower altitudes and expanded latitudes, especially to the north, and eventually to the far reaches of Canada and Alaska. They remain restricted to the Americas, with the vast majority of the 300+ species residents of South America.

Even as Control said it, he had known that he was also telling her he didn't mind leaving her there, alone, on the other side.

You feel like if they just read the manual first ... If we had a manual, that is.

That month the southern white rhino and a species of pangolin had gone extinct. Wildfires in five countries meant animals were crawling to the side of roads to beg people speeding by in cars for water. People were poisoning vultures and shooting bats out of the sky, scared of pandemics. To care more meant putting a bullet in your brain. So, like many, I had learned to care less. Silvina called it "the fatal adaptation.

You don't go home at night with it in your stomach, in your bones. In a few weeks, when you have seen everything, you will have been living with it for a long time, too. You will be just like us—only more so, because it is getting worse.

On Climate Change:) We know not only what we need to do, we have the capacity to do it. It is simply that we are not doing it. So that's one hope.

I was a ghost. I was a ghost.

wasn't. This stutter-step of disaster after natural disaster was just a blip next to LED lights, driverless cars, a possible end to poverty through gene-edited crops. Mulled wine and stockings over the fireplace. Crisp smell of the six-foot fir that had been cut down so it could be adorned with plastic and glass baubles that polluted the house. As the tree died in celebration, there in our family room. Maybe I was withdrawn during their

I see it, I taste it. All the contamination. The low-level radiation, the storage sites, the runoff. Every place is sick—there's sick everywhere

Borne wasn't even a killer as I was a killer, but someone who killed the innocent and tried to call them guilty.

The photo had been taken by a member of the Séance & Science Brigade about a week or two before the Event that had created Area X. The photographer had gone missing when the border came down. It remained the only photo of Saul Evans they had, except for some shots from twenty years earlier, well before he'd come to the coast.

Curiosity could be a powerful distraction.

With a snarl of frustration, Control put aside the question of Whitby and buried himself again in the director's notes, kept Grace's intel about the director's focus in mind while trying to divine from those dried entrails more than they might actually contain.

the trees were putting on their September garments, brown and red and yellow

The trouble with logic is that its relationship with reality is usually obscure.

As Shakespeare points out, it is common for people to die. Going

There came another explosion, and Jonathan flinched, but Mamoud moved not at all, and somehow his calm steadied Jonathan. He had the demeanor of a doctor or a civil servant, in a useful way.