405 Quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

The operational damage from an event can linger in the mind like a ghost.Freedom could take you farther from what you sought, not closer.

We’re astronauts. All of the expedition members have been astronauts.

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

H.P. Lovecraft is a self-admitted early influence on Ligotti’s work. However, in a kind of metaphysical horror story of its own, Ligotti early on subsumed Lovecraft and left his dry husk behind, having taken what sustenance he needed for his own devices. (Most other writers are, by contrast, consumed by Lovecraft when they attempt to devour him.)

Because Control knew that belief in a scientific process only took you so far. The ziggurats of illogic erected by your average domestic terrorist as he or she bought the fertiliser or made a detonator took on their own teetering momentum and power. When those towers crashed to the earth, they still existed whole in the perpetrator’s mind, and everyone else’s too – just for different reasons.

It creates out our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien--one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters.

We lack the analogies’ was itself somehow deficient as a diagnosis, linguists burning up during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere after encountering Area X.

But how is that different from any other godforsaken stretch of coast half off the grid?” There were still dozens of them all across the country. Places that were poison to real-estate agents, with little infrastructure and a long history of distrust of the government.

The time for expeditions was over.