Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. 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.

That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

Silence creates its own violence.

some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.

A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.

The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?

There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to re-live, certain kinds of connections that are so deep that when broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.

We all live in a kind of continuous dream," I told him. "When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we've taken as reality.

Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.

Perhaps my only real expertise, my only talent, is to endure beyond the endurable.

You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.

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

W]hen you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.

You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what's left to you.

What can you do when your five senses are not enough?

I am walking forever on the path from the border to base camp. It is taking a long time, and I know it will take even longer to get back. There is no one with me. I am all by myself. The trees are not trees the birds are not birds and I am not me but just something that has been walking for a very long time…

We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination.

When you are too close to the center of a mystery there is no way to pull back and see the shape of it entire.

At the time, I was seeking oblivion, and I sought in those blank, anonymous faces, even the most painfully familiar, a kind of benign escape. A death that would not mean being dead.

I loved him, but I didn't need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.

This part I will do alone, leaving you behind. Don't follow. I'm well beyond you now, and traveling very fast.

I am just the biologist; I don't require any of this to have a deeper meaning. I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. 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.

I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.

That's the problem with people who are not human. You can't tell how badly they're hurt, or how much they need your help, and until you ask, they don't always know how to tell you.