405 Quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

And so I wept my story into the ocean and the ocean received it.

Birds weren’t supposed to levitate or have four mouths or twenty pairs of wings or twelve sets of legs and undulate like a dragon. But, what could you do?

During the day I would go to my work worn and tired, cursing the bewitching night and her empty dreams, but as night came my daily life with its bonds and shackles of work would appear a petty, false, ludicrous vanity.

So long as you don’t tell people you don’t know something, they’ll probably think you know it.

A falcon screamed down from above and speared one of the two, and peeled off to rise again before the survivor had time to evade or mourn the loss, as if there had always been one and not two. As if there had always only ever been one Strange Bird. But from above, even dying, the companion defiant, urging the last on, and blessing the bird that had caught her, for it was only acting as to its nature and there was no cruelty in that.

You don’t know what to say. You won’t know what to say for a long time. Your reply was so many years ago.

Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.

Never has a setting been so able to live without the souls traversing it.

We must love what has been damaged, because everything has been damaged. And to love the damage is to know you care about that world. That you’re still alive. That the world is alive.