Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

I'm not an answer," she said. "I'm a question." She might also be a message incarnate, a signal in the flesh, even if she hadn't yet figured out what story she was supposed to tell.

I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left in me.

Sometimes I feel as if we live in hell and don't even realize it. The lacerations are endless. The lies we accept, the rituals we perform. All these useless acts.

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead.

I also liked the ocean, and I found staring at it had a calming effect. The air was so clean, so fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always been during the modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself. Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.

Because dead things felt only love for the universe.

But I knew from experience how hopeless this pursuit, this attempt to weed out bias, was. 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.

You forgive if you can forgive yourself. Or live with what you've done. If you cannot live with what you've done, you cannot live with what others have done either.

And God said, Let there be light. God said that, Saul, and He has come from so far away, and His home is gone, but His purpose remains. Would you deny Him His new kingdom?

Delusional. Naïve. Unworkable. Dangerous. That is what the enemy called the necessities for survival. For flourishing.

What is too much to bear? Not being alive is too much to bear.

We must love what has been damaged, because everything has been damaged. And to love the damage is to know you care about that world. That you're still alive. That the world is alive.

You can't trust how I'll get somewhere, but you have to trust I know where I'm going. I always know where I'm going.

Early on, I had thought Wick was reaching for a body across the bed. But, for a long time, he had been reaching for me--for the person called Rachel, who did indeed, in the end, love back the person name Wick.

Imbuing fiction with a life that extends beyond the last word is in some ways the goal: the ending that goes beyond the ending in the reader's mind, so invested are they in the story.

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

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 . . .

And I am trying my best, too. Even if we don't always know what that means or how it will play out. You can get caught up in something that's beyond you, and never understand why.

Become a type, no one saw you. Paranoid thought: What better disguise? But disguise for what?

The world is filled with people who have too much imagination solely because the people around them have too little.

A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way, still shown across the miles as a warning, an invitation, or even just a static signal. People opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes, so you couldn't see it, because they had no other choice.

an organism's primary directive is to continue to exist—

That tablecloth created by forced labor looks amazing on that table manufactured with formaldehyde in a sweatshop.

Whatever your medium, the goal of any arts practice is to develop a greater set of skills for dealing with challenges. Experience will help you close that gap between your own vision and the piece's final execution.