Jeff VanderMeer Quotes

“Behind me lay the increasingly solemn silhouette of what was no longer really a lighthouse but instead a kind of reliquary.”

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

“Inside the house, my parents did whatever banal, messy things people in the human world usually did, some of it loudly. But I could easily lose myself in the microworld of the pool.”

“There were thousands of ‘dead’ spaces like the lot I had observed, thousands of transitional environments that no one saw, that had been rendered invisible because they were not ‘of use.’ ”

“I had the sense that they now saw the world through a kind of veil, that they spoke to their interviewers from across a vast distance in time and space.”

“Silence creates its own violence.”

“An absence is not a presence, but still with each new depiction of a thistle, a shiver worked deeper and deeper into my spine.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“Her head sagged downward and she lost consciousness, then came to again and stared out at the waves. She muttered a few words, one of which might have been ‘remote’ or ‘demote’ and another that might have been ‘hatching’ or ‘watching.’ But I could not be sure.”

“Something about the idea of a tower that headed straight down played with a twinned sensation of vertigo and a fascination with structure.”

“There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.”

“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?”

“After a while, a kind of unease came over me as I began to perceive a terrible presence hovering in the background of these entries. I saw the Crawler or some surrogate approaching in that space just beyond the thistle, and the single focus of the journal keeper a way of coping with that horror.”

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