Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

Perhaps a copy could also be superior to the original, create a new reality by avoiding old mistakes.

This false return, this corrupted reunion. This end of everything.

Nature practices deceptions in every angle. Evolution will create a being for any niche that can be found, no matter how unlikely. When

What can you do when your five senses are not enough? Because I still couldn't truly see it here, any more than I had seen it under the microscope, and that's what scared me the most. Why couldn't I see it?

Rachel, Rachel—what am I?" The strobe of colors felt like a smile or a flash of relief. "That's a tough one, Borne. I don't know what you are." "Am I a squirrel?" "I don't think so." "Am I a fish?" "Definitely not!" "Am I a Ã¢â'¬Â¦ fox?! Secretly raised as a common animal. But really a royal fox. Most royal of foxes. First among fox-kind." I

And me still not seeing, and the brightness coiled within me assumed an almost hushed quality, as if we were in a cathedral.

Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye but not notice the log in your own eye?

The thing about people who want to show you things was that sometimes their interest in granting you knowledge was laced with a little voyeuristic sadism. They were waiting for the Look or the Reaction, and they didn't care what it was so long as it inflicted some kind of discomfort.

Little in New York felt glamorous anymore. An eruption of the real had overtaken the unreal that week. Everyone felt the depression of that. Wildfires had consumed states in the heartland. Cyclones another. Earthquakes from fracking were omnipresent. Oil spills from pipelines that didn't bear thinking about. Pandemic, a rumor gathering strength.

That placing trust in a word like border had been a mistake, a trap. A slow unraveling of terms unrecognized until too late.

Rachel, Rachel—what am I?" The strobe of colors felt like a smile or a flash of relief. "That's a tough one, Borne. I don't know what you are." "Am I a squirrel?" "I don't think so." "Am I a fish?" "Definitely not!" "Am I a Ã¢â'¬Â¦ fox?! Secretly raised as a common animal. But really a royal fox. Most royal of foxes. First among fox-kind." I shook my head. "No, not a fox.

The enormity of this experience combined with the heartbeat and the crescendo of sound from its ceaseless writing to fill me up until I had no room left. This moment, which I might have been waiting for my entire life all unknowing—this moment of an encounter with the most beautiful, the most terrible thing I might ever experience—was beyond me.

Death, as I was beginning to understand it, was not the same thing here as back across the border.

Most people in New York City had started wearing masks, to keep the pollution out, but also to protect privacy.

What, if anything, might have made a difference, or if it was always going to happen like this. In this universe. On this day.

The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.

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. Almost anything could happen now, and did.

And I never did look back for better or worse. If funding for a project ran out or the area we studied was suddenly bought for development, I never returned. There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive. Certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside of you.

A quiet click of the door, then whistling into the wind like an idiot as soon as he'd taken a few steps—thanking the God who'd made him, in the end, so lucky, even if in such a delayed and unexpected way. Some things came to you late, but late was better than never.

Here it came. There it was. How comfort led to overreach or to some half reveal of what should be hidden.

the soft weight of Europe pulled over us like a quilt.

A name was a dangerous luxury here.

We were assholes and opportunists and sociopaths, a lot of us. We thought we were on the right side of things. But what did it mean that our clients resembled ghouls and grave robbers? I knew their families, or photos of their families

Or as he said sometimes, the system abhors source, makes its mapping into a maze, a mockery, and the more you think you understand it, the more you are colonized by it. And lost.