405 Quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

But the truth was what Silvina had seen: we were already ghosts. We just kept haunting each other for no reason. Even as we kept awaiting the mortal blow. But there would be no mortal blow, just endless depths.

I loved him, but I didn’t need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.

None of us are changing. Everything is fine. Let’s have a picnic.

It is superstition,” she admitted. “But it might be true.

He believed a kind of fragmentation had crept into people’s minds in the modern era.

The only solution to the environment is neglect, which requires our collapse.

Annihilation!” she shrieked at me, flailing in confusion. “Annihilation! Annihilation!” The word seemed more meaningless the more she repeated it, like the cry of a bird with a broken wing.

It was what my mother said sometimes-to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn’t mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us. My mother had found that idea comforting.

Throughout all of this, my parents did not forget my education. Not a formal education but the education that mattered. What to value. What to hold on to. What to let go of. What to fight for and what to discard. Where the traps were.