Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

You prefer this place, you really do, don't you?

would destroy the planet or save it? In its recognition of her, Ghost Bird knew that something would survive, that she would survive.

At least, that's what he chose to believe. To have a reason for his packing, and a place to think of as a sanctuary. Or a hiding place.

As I adjusted to the light, the Crawler kept changing at a lightning pace, as if to mock my ability to comprehend it. It was a figure within a series of refracted panes of glass. It was a series of layers in the shape of an archway. It was a great sluglike monster ringed by satellites of even odder creatures. It was a glistening star. My eyes kept glancing off of it as if an optic nerve was not enough

the tower was breathing. The tower breathed, and the walls when I went to touch them carried the echo of a heartbeat Ã¢â'¬Â¦ and they were not made of stone but of living tissue

The beetles Wick altered, or made from materials he'd stolen from the Company, didn't just teach when shoved in your ear; they could also rid you of memories and add memories. People who couldn't face the present shoved them into their ears so they could experience someone else's happier memories from long ago, from places that didn't exist anymore.

Time for another drink, somewhere else. A kind of oblivion.

We were descending into an organism.

Accidents and acts of God don't mean a thing, unless they're followed later by acts of will.

Egnaro is a secret known to everyone but yourself. It

As if somehow the blankness of the walls fed off of silence, and that something might appear in the spaces between words if we were not careful.

What was a person but someone who turned monstrous, anyway?

He made no distinction between pornography and science fiction, often wondering out loud why they confiscated the one and not the other.

Both the Star Wars and Friday the Thirteenth franchises have much to answer for.

Now he would inhabit the very center of corridors. He would put no hand to any surface. He would believe like a ghost that knew if it made contact with anyone or anything its touch would slide through and that creature would then know that it existed in a state of purgatory.

But I can communicate with you via this small metal contraption (like an old television set): I see your mirrored face and hear your voice; you receive my daily messages and the reflection of my image.

Alcohol made it hard to tell a demon from a monster.

I have come to have a great affection for monsters...

We all just want to people, and none of us know what that really means.

Never be tricked by the small print! It's right there in front of you, right there in front of you, and you can't even see it and then suddenly it makes you notice it! And I tell you, once you've seen it it's got you!

The look on her face in the empty lot—that blankness—and then, later, in the sessions, the warring of contempt, wildness, casual vulnerability, and vehemence, strength. That had laid him low. That had expanded until it hooked into the whole of him, no part of him not committed.

With sunset came a premonition of beauty: The pre-dusk sky already had so many stars in it. Before he activated the lens, he sat there for a few minutes, staring up at them, at the deep blue of the sky that framed them. At such moments, he felt as if he really did live on the edge of the known world. As if he was alone, in the way he wanted to be alone: when he chose to be and not when the world imposed it on him.

Books as a salve to the boredom of TV? No, because the bookmark just began to separate one sea of unread words from another.

There's three ways not to see what you don't want to,' she told me. 'One is the coward's way and too damned painful. The other is to close your eyes forever which is the same as the first, when it comes to it. The third is the hardest and the best: You have to make sure only the things you can afford to see come before you.' *