Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

How many invisible, abstract incantations ruled the world beyond the Southern Reach?

The door might not have been created by whatever had created Area X.

He was Control, and he was in control.

Wick spoke in such alchemies and distillations of hope that I couldn't pick out the facts from the fictions, or which he told me to reassure himself.

O mapa foi a primeira forma de desinformação, pois o que era um mapa senão uma maneira de enfatizar certas coisas e tornar outras invisíveis? Sempre éramos mandadas de volta ao mapa, para memorizar seus detalhes.

There are countless things in this vast universe that humankind does not know.

Nada que viva y respire es realmente objetivo, ni siquiera en estado de aislamiento, ni siquiera aunque lo único que poseyera al cerebro fuese el deseo autoinmolador de la verdad.

I did not feel as if I were a person but simply a receiving station for a series of transmissions.

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.

But by then, whenever this was, the Strange Bird did not want to live, or did not know she could live, and that was the same thing in the end.

Jovial" had always been a pretext, from the high school football team's locker room on—the kind of hearty banter that covered up greater and lesser crimes.

Jovial" had always been a pretext - the kind of hearty banter that covered up greater and lesser crimes.

As the Latin poet Horace once noted, the intellect of the mind knows nothing. Instead, people use it to make common sense of the world and have myths that explain things in everyday terms. Still, the secrets of the universe continue to transcend the quotidian.

If I went rummaging through your carcass, would I find you?

En ocasiones las personas ofrecen su luz pero esta parpadea y es extremadamente tenue, porque nunca antes se ha ocupado nadie de ellas. Porque han dado demasiado de sí mismos y ya no les queda nada.

Although by then not much was disgusting because the word familiar had changed so much since I had woken.

How could a superstition be true? Maybe "superstition" was what snuck into the gaps, the cracks, when you worked in a place with falling morale and depleted resources. Maybe superstition was what happened when your director went missing in action and your assistant director was still mourning the loss. Maybe that was when you fell back on spells and rituals, the reptile brain saying to the rest of you, "I'll take it from here. You've had your shot.

Control blinked once, twice, three times.

Perhaps because trees did not resist. Trees fell over on their own accord, sometimes, as if to prove their love for the ax. The chainsaw that felled most of them just completed a trees own inevitable thought.

Can you not distinguish truth from fiction? Or were you never taught the difference?

Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind.

We were not told what the device measured or why we should be afraid should it glow red. After the first few hours, I had grown so used to it that I hadn't looked at it again. We had been forbidden watches and compasses.

The voices of the women had the especially sweet and rapturous charm of a gentle stroke passing over the surface of one's skin.

A creator who no longer remembered the creation: Wasn't that the definition of a god?