Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

Be still that human need. To fill the silence with words.

There was no moment like any other moment and yet each moment was the same.

My mind made them into insects, because my mind wanted stories it could understand, stories that would not frighten it. But still I knew my mind was tricking me, and for a second I loved my mind for the deception.

People with packs are people with purpose.

Something about the idea of a tower that headed straight down played with a twinned sensation of vertigo and a fascination with structure. I could not tell which part I craved and which I feared, and I kept seeing the inside of nautilus shells and other naturally occurring patterns balanced against a sudden leap off a cliff into the unknown

What does the border look like?" A child's question. A question whose answer means nothing. There is nothing but border. There is no border.

Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, perhaps automatic, need to assimilate and to mimic. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation.

Among all the impossible things he had already witnessed, what were a few more?

you look you see only bitterness or despair. If all of these conditions and situations apply to you, I recommend a refreshing suicide attempt.

They'd never really been my friends; I didn't cultivate friends, I had just inherited them from my husband.

I felt in that moment as if it were all a dream—the training, my former life, the world I had left behind. None of that mattered anymore. Only this place mattered, only this moment, and not because the psychologist had hypnotized me. In the grip of that powerful emotion, I stared out toward the coast, through the jagged narrow spaces between the trees. There, a greater darkness gathered, the confluence of the night, the clouds, and the sea. Somewhere beyond, another border.

Take two pictures representing the same subject; one may be dismissed as illustration if it is dominated by the subject and has no other justification but the subject, the other may be called painting if the subject is completely absorbed in the style, which is its own justification, whatever the subject, and has an intrinsic value.

It's not superstition," she said. They all turned to her, swiveling on their stools. "It is superstition," she admitted. "But it might be true.

The stories he told became boring to me through repetition, but I understand now that he was just trying to fix that place with the compass of his memories.

If I were you, I would never tell ugly stories about ingenious ways of killing people, for you never can tell but that someone at the table may be tired of his or her nearest and dearest.

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

Observation had always meant more to me than interaction.

The banal drawling frowning speech of men who don't care about what they're doing. Until forced to. Who all unawares destroy their own warrens, who poison their own food, convinced of righteousness.

He wanted to stay there, at the bar, around people but not involved with them.

That if they could not have a fierce joy in their struggle, then they were not truly free but governed by fear and doubt.

I loved the late-night slow burn of being out, my mind turning over some problem, some piece of data, while able to appear sociable but still existing apart.

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 a defiance in that, too.

If I don't have real answers, it is because we still don't know what questions to ask.

It might be inexplicable. It might be beyond the limits of my senses to capture—or my science or my intellect—but I still believed I was in the presence of some kind of living creature, one that practiced mimicry using my own thoughts. For even then, 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.