Quotes from Jeff Vandermeer

RATS. In sewers. In religions. In words like pirate, desperate, and narrative. Rats infest this glossary as surely as words and mushrooms.

He drank deeply from his orange juice - really drank to savor it so that for a minute or two nothing existed in the house but his enjoyment.

The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower. Didn't

Nothing we brought with us is from the present. Not our clothes, not our shoes. It's all old junk. Restored crap. We've been living in the past this whole time. In some sort of reenactment. And why?" She made a derisive sound. "You don't even know why.

Also, Moss liked to rescue whatever animal or plant needed it. She believed they had earned it.

The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we're alive.

You're going to have to get much smarter very quickly.

A sudden flash of his partner Wyte, telling him he was compromised, him replying, "I don't have an opinion on that.

There, scuttling across the floor, blind and querulous, is the old cell phone—scrabbling and bulky, trying to get away from you.

Gerard turned away and ignored the cruelty of the meerkats, tore it from his mind. Lucretia needed a heart.

I want to be lost," Silvina wrote once. "I want to be so far beyond anything that there is no map, and the compass spins wild. And when I come back, if I come back, you need to know I've changed, and with that change it means I carry 'lost' with me everywhere, even in the heart of the city. That I am lost forever, and that's how we need to be. So the systems can't find us, can't wreck us. So our heads are clear.

I felt as if the whole house was like a living organism slowly and imperceptibly digesting me by the action of some stupefying gastric juice.

During the day I would go to my work worn and tired, cursing the bewitching night and her empty dreams, but as night came my daily life with its bonds and shackles of work would appear a petty, false, ludicrous vanity.

Sometimes you had to keep things from people just so they wouldn't do the first thing that came into their heads.

an institution is where they put Aunt Maggy when she began collecting Wheaties in a stamp album.

What strange creatures we are, I thought as I stood there. We live, we love, we die with such random joy and grief, excitement and boredom, each mind as individual as a fingerprint, and just as enigmatic. We make up stories to understand ourselves and tell ourselves that they are true, when in fact they only represent an individual impression of one individual fingerprint, no matter how universal we attempt to make them.

No doubt the detour to deliver Lake had made the sheep late for an appointment.

Except, later, I understood Ned better—after he was gone. It wasn't just escape, all those mysterious details, that amazing mythical salamander. By telling me the giant salamander could be near where we lived, he was changing the landscape around me. He was changing what we dreaded, what stifled him, into something exciting and positive and new.

But the truth was what Silvina had seen: we were already ghosts. We just kept haunting each other for no reason. Even as we kept awaiting the mortal blow. But there would be no mortal blow, just endless depths.

I do not know how this thorn got here or from how far away it came, but by luck or fate or design at some point it found the lighthouse keeper and did not let him go. How long he had as it remade him, repurposed him, is a mystery. There was no one to observe, to bear witness—until thirty years later a biologist catches a glimpse of him and speculates on what he might have become. Catalyst. Spark. Engine.

Control said nothing, had said nothing for quite some time, as if he didn't trust words anymore. Or had begun to cherish the answers silence gave him.

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.

My mother was an overwrought artist who achieved some success but was a little too fond of alcohol and always struggled to find new clients, while my dad the underemployed accountant specialized in schemes to get rich quick that usually brought in nothing. Neither of them seemed to possess the ability to focus on one thing for any length of time. Sometimes it felt as if I had been placed with a family rather than born into one.

Imagine these expeditions, and then recognize that they all still exist in Area X in some form, even the ones that came