405 Quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

That’s when you rise, finally. You rise out of the mud, in the rain, and you go back inside and suddenly everything gets really cold and calm. The answer doesn’t lie in your backyard because no one is going to come and save you even if you beg them to. Especially if you beg them to. You’re on your own, like you’ve always been on your own. You have to keep going forward, until you can’t go forward anymore.You have to hang on. You’re almost there. You can make it to the end.

You couldn’t martyr yourself to Area X, you could only disappear trying, and not even be sure of that.

The hegemony of what was real had been altered, or broken, forever.

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.

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

Have we been compromised by our own data? The answer is: Of course.

There might be life, right under our noses. But there’s always been life right under our noses – we’re just too blind to see it. These fucking questions – they don’t matter.

The Thing about people who wanted to show you things was that sometimes their interest in granting you knowledge was laced with a little voyeuristic sadism. They were waiting for the Look or the Reaction, and they didn’t care what it was so long as it inflicted some kind of discomfort.

I’d wake in the morning, my head fuzzy, sometimes with someone I knew but who was a stranger just leaving, and realize I was one day closer to the end of it all.