Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

It is superstition," she admitted. "But it might be true.

God, but the coast here was painfully beautiful, the dark lush greens of the fir trees piercing his brain, the half-raging sky and sea, the surge of salt water against the rocks twinned to the urgent wash of blood through his arteries as he waited for her to kill him or hear him out. Seditious thoughts: there would be nothing too terrible about dying out here, about becoming part of all of this.

If I don't have real answers, it is because we still don't know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.

Do you understand? Nothing thrives without being broken. Nothing exists without being dead first.

Some things came to you late, but late was better than never.

The words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will.

A whale can injure another whale with its sonar. A whale can speak to another whale across sixty miles of ocean. A whale is as intelligent as we are, just in a way we can't quite measure or understand. Because we're these incredibly blunt instruments.

Have we been compromised by our own data? The answer is: Of course.

The word "Annihilation" was followed by "help induce immediate suicide." We had all been given self-destruct buttons, but the only one who could push them was dead.

The only solution to the environment is neglect, which requires our collapse.

There's nothing to this world,' he said, 'but what our senses tell us about it, and all I can do is the best I can on that information.

What was true empathy anyway but sometimes turning away, leaving someone alone?

Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.

I doubt you will enjoy it. But that is the price of change. Someone always pays.

Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.

We have built so many toxic constructs, we cannot see through the latticework. We have built so many mirrors, there are no windows to shatter.

He was also, according to his file, "a first-rate scientist partial to beer," the kind of mind Control had seen before. It needed dulling to slow it down or to distance itself from the possibility of despair. Beer versus scientist represented a kind of schism between the banality of speech versus the originality of thought. An ongoing battle.

My Manager forced me to put my beetle in my own ear, a clear waste and an act that gave me nightmares: of a burning city through which giant carnivorous lizards prowled, eating survivors off of balconies. In one particularly vivid moment, I stood on a ledge as the jaws closed in, heat-swept, and tinged with the smell of rotting flesh. Beetles intended for the tough, tight minds of children should not be used by adults. We still remember a kinder, gentler world.

You're on your own, like you've always been on your own. You have to keep going forward, until you can't go forward anymore.

In my absence, the surveyor had become a kind of frenzied serial killer of the inanimate.

I would never know anyone like Borne ever again, and even if I saw Borne again it would never be the same as when we lived together in the Balcony Cliffs, the way we'd run down the corridors and punched holes in the walls and joked and laughed and I'd taught him new words that he'd held there in his mind like jewels, and repeated over and over until he knew them better than I did.

Never has a setting been so able to live without the souls traversing it.

And a soul is just a delusion that lives in the body. No delusion survives death. Death is more honest than that.

but this was always the test of our relationship. Were we symbiotic or parasitic?