405 Quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it’s a mulch of all of my past reading.

She liked the feeling of being winnowed down, as if there had been too much of her before, that anything unnecessary had been taken away and what was left was pure.

We were always finding each other and losing each other and finding each other again, and that was just the way of us.

And a soul is just a delusion that lives in the body. No delusion survives death. Death is more honest than that.

He wondered why the stewardesses were looking at him funny by mid-flight, and realized he’d been responding to their rote kindness with the intensity of someone who has never experienced courtesy, or never expects to experience it again.

My free will was compromised, if only by the severe temptation of the unknown.

This was really the only thing I discovered in him after his return: a deep and unending solitude, as if he had been granted a gift that he didn’t know what to do with. A gift that was poison to him and eventually killed him. But would it have killed me?

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.

That tablecloth created by forced labor looks amazing on that table manufactured with formaldehyde in a sweatshop.