Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

The fall took forever. The fall took no time at all.

Many of our clients engaged in "greenwashing": co-opting environmental causes to project an image of being sustainable.

My voice had a rasp to it, then. I wasn't yet comfortable talking human. My voice had a rasp, and I gazed upon the bison head on the wall and my voice became raspier still. I gazed upon the mossy rock imported from another country, the water feature in the house, and wanted only to return to all fours and drink from the pond. To gaze at the reflection and remember who I was, not who I had become

The hell of that, the hell of nothing at all, which feels as if you are reliving every moment of your life at the Southern Reach-descending for no reason, for nothing, to find nothing.

Let me tell you what happens when you burn a person's body, pull out all of his teeth, glue his head to a plate, and shove a bomb in his ear. You become that person's object of undying hatred.

Now he wondered why he'd bothered. He disliked having such thoughts because he wasn't above it all—he was in it—but they were hard to suppress.

Betly was a successful man and thought that everyone else should love life as much as he did.

When the memory became too faint, too abstract, it would transform itself into an old rotator cuff injury, a pain so thin yet so sharp that he could trace the line of it all the way across his shoulder blade and down his back.

I knew it for an hour on the autobahn, under a gray Rhenish sky, and forgot it in your arms.

Earth people made him uncomfortable, particularly in groups.

Here, I think, lies the misfortune of philosophy: always we encounter on our travels some exceptional freak to which the philosophical rules are found to be non-applicable. Which are right – the freaks or the philosophical principles?

We lack the analogies' was itself somehow deficient as a diagnosis, linguists burning up during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere after encountering Area X.

There is a dazed panic and coiled restraint behind your every movement that will come out later through the flesh, the bone. Months from now you will wake sore and bruised, as if your body cannot forget what happened, and this is the only way it can express the trauma.

confess I went because I had hopes that there remained some spark of the man I'd once known. But I never really found it.

the seeming attempt to cast it away turned into an endless embrace.

he considered mankind a race of crazy half-monkeys, intent upon suicide.

Whatever we think of the border, it's important to recognise it as a limitation of Area X.

But in either instance, if it has intelligence, that intelligence is far different from our own. It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien—one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters.

I lay there, panting, as the skin of Borne around me, the flesh of Borne, went prickly and rigid again and the cilia that rubbed up against me turned into tiny mouths that screamed into my clothes, arms and legs and hair. Borne was screaming silently into his own body because he could not scream on the outside.

They had their lives, and I had mine. I liked most of all pretending to be a biologist, and pretending often leads to becoming a reasonable facsimile of what you mimic, even if only from a distance

What a nothing you made out of the world you were given.

Don't thank anyone for what you should already have.

Because Control knew that belief in a scientific process only took you so far. The ziggurats of illogic erected by your average domestic terrorist as he or she bought the fertiliser or made a detonator took on their own teetering momentum and power. When those towers crashed to the earth, they still existed whole in the perpetrator's mind, and everyone else's too – just for different reasons.

now in her eyes the knowledge that this was futile, that this had always been futile