405 Quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

So she sang back silently to them, as a comfort, there in the cell, and when the moonlight lay thick and bright against the gritty cheek of the sand dune, the foxes would gambol and prance for the sheer delight of it and beckon her to join them, would let her into their minds that she might know what it was to gambol and to prance on those four legs, then these four legs, to see the world from a fox’s level. It was almost like flying. Almost.

I’m not an answer,” she said. “I’m a question.” She might also be a message incarnate, a signal in the flesh, even if she hadn’t yet figured out what story she was supposed to tell.

You can’t trust how I’ll get somewhere, but you have to trust I know where I’m going. I always know where I’m going.

But I knew from experience how hopeless this pursuit, this attempt to weed out bias, was. 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.

If I wasn’t a writer, I don’t know what I’d be. Probably a marine biologist or something.

Cross-pollination and “contamination” is really important to the health of fiction, and sometimes it’s a literal conversation, too, in that writers who might never otherwise meet and talk do so because of our anthologies.

The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don’t know if I accept everything even now. I don’t know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there’s defiance in that, too.

This plastic disk.” “And you throw it.” “Why?” “For fun.” “Team sport.

And one day, out of Heaven knows what material, he spun the beast a wonderful name, and from that moment it grew into a god and a religion. The Woman indulged in religion once a week at a church near by, and took Conradin with her, but to him the church service was an alien rite in the House of Rimmon. Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the tool-shed, he worshipped with mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wooden hutch where dwelt Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret.