Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

What am I? How am I connected? What is my purpose? What is all of this, felt in the flesh? Why is it so beautiful? What is beautiful? Why do I not know? What else don't I know? When will I know it? Will I ever know? Would knowing be too much?

Hay preguntas que pueden acabar contigo si la respuesta se te niega el suficiente tiempo.

In the city, the line between nightmare and reality was fluid, just as the context of the words killer and death had shifted over time. Perhaps Mord was responsible. Perhaps we all were.

The lighthouse teaches me to work hard, to keep my room clean, to be honest and to be nice to people." Then, reflecting, looking down at her feet, "My room is a mess and I lie sometimes and I'm not always nice to people but that's the idea.

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

There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you. *

Sometimes insight into character and dialogue means being silent.

I think this is an asylum. But so is the rest of the world.

Solitude could press down on a person, seem to demand that action be taken.

Was this first contact, or last contact?

You wouldn't understand me even if I made sense.

Sometimes you get a sense of when the truth of things will not be revealed by microscopes.

The gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world.

Everyone always tells you that you become more alone as you get older. People write about it in books. They shout it out on street corners. They mumble it in their sleep. But it's always a shock when it happens to you.}

Grace was joining him at his request, to assist him in staring out at the swamp while they talked about Area X. Because he'd thought a change of setting - leaving the confines of the concrete coffin - might help soften her animosity. Before he realized just how truly hellish and prehistoric the landscape was, and thus now pre-hysterical as well. Look out upon this mosquito orgy, and warm to me, Grace.

If making a doppelganger using the priests' emerald powder, the dulcimer should be played during the mixing; otherwise, your monster may coalesce with a vestigial tale or tail. It is also known that playing the dulcimer after dinner increases the chance of pleasant conversation, if accompanied by wine and a nice dessert.

In college, what had always stuck with him in Astronomy 101 was that the first astronomers to think of points of light not as part of a celestial tapestry revolving around the earth but as individual planets had had to wrench their imaginations--and thus their analogies and metaphors--out of a grooved track that had been running through everyone's minds for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Ever since she had become my Manager, my raises had become smaller and smaller. The last raise had been a huge leech shaped like a helmet. It was meant to suck all the bad thoughts out of your head. It smelled like bacon, which seemed promising. I had invited Mord and Leer over to my apartment and we'd fried it up in a skillet. I'd gotten a week's worth of sandwiches out of it.

Looking for hidden meaning in these papers was the same as looking for hidden meaning in the natural world around us. If it existed, it could be activated only by the eye of the beholder.

That is why the human race is dying—too limited an imagination. No thought for the consequences.

It did not care about your belief system, your grasp on reality, the excellence of your analysis or your senses, for the anti-story of the story-creature became story by retelling effortlessly what lived at the core of you.

And so I wept my story into the ocean and the ocean received it.

Talking around the edge of a catastrophe. But wasn't that what people did, if you were still alive?

is nothing more liberating than playing an illogical game where only you understand all of the rules.