Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

I told him point-blank so there would be no mistake: This person he wanted to know better did not exist; I was who I seemed to be from the outside. That would never change.

Honesty was often just a way of being cruel.

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.

But minds find ways to protect themselves, build fortifications, and some of those walls become traps.

Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people's attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.

I think I would remember forgetting that.

Would that not be the final humbling of the human condition? That the trees and birds, the fox and the rabbit, the wolf and the deer... reach a point at which they do not even notice us, as we are transformed.

Some things you can be so close to that you never grasp their true nature.

Am I a person or a weapon?" Always he wanted to know that he was a person. He just kept giving me different choices so one time I might slip up and say, "You're not a person." "You are a person. But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.

I really wanted to lose myself. People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control, have never wanted control.

If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven't changed instead." A warning from his mother, once upon a time, delivered as if she'd upended a box of spy-advice fortune cookies and chosen one at random.

Everything was imbued with emotion, awash in it, and I was no longer a biologist but somehow the crest of a wave building and building but never crashing to shore.

We live in a universe driven by chance," his father had said once, "but the bullshit artists all want causality.

The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don't know if I accept everything even now. I don't know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there's defiance in that, too.

It was a test of a fragile trust. It was a test of our curiosity and fascination, which walked side by side with our fear. A test of whether we preferred to be ignorant or unsafe.

We must trust our thoughts while we sleep. We must trust our hunches. We must begin to examine all of those things that we think of as irrational simply because we do not understand them. In other words, we must distrust the rational, the logical, the sane, in an attempt to reach for something higher, for something more worthy.

People who asked questions didn't necessary like being asked questions.

In unusual situations there can be a comfort in the presence of even someone you think might be your enemy.

Observation had always meant more to me than interaction...My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become part of them with ease.

Whenever I write first drafts, I like to maximize the possibility of f-ups, mistakes, mis-written words, digressions, crazy changes in tone, etc. This is why I don't use outlining software or even a computer and why I spread pages and images and research materials kinda crazy across the table. Never know what'll happen.

It was what my mother said sometimes-to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn't mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us. My mother had found that idea comforting.

But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?

Writing, for me, is like trying to restart an engine that has rested for years, silent and rusting, in an empty lot--choked with water and dirt, infiltrated by ants and spides and cockroaches. Vines and weeds shoved into it and sprouting of it. A kind of coughing splutter, an eruption of leaves and dust, a voice that sounds a little like mine but is not the same as it was before.

I hesitated for just a moment. Some part of me wanted to see the creature, after having heard it for so many days. Was it the remnants of the scientist in me, trying to regroup, trying to apply logic when all that mattered was survival? If so, it was a very small part. I ran.