405 Quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

I felt in that moment as if it were all a dream – the training, my former life, the world I had left behind. None of that mattered anymore. Only this place mattered, only this moment, and not because the psychologist had hypnotized me. In the grip of that powerful emotion, I stared out toward the coast, through the jagged narrow spaces between the trees. There, a greater darkness gathered, the confluence of the night, the clouds, and the sea. Somewhere beyond, another border.

Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite.

Angela Carter, Leonora Carrington, even nonsurrealists like Kafka and Nabokov – writers like these, who create paths between the firmly grounded and flights of fantasy, are my personal North Star.

There, scuttling across the floor, blind and querulous, is the old cell phone – scrabbling and bulky, trying to get away from you.

It’s not being hurt that hurts,′ Borne said.

You’re on your own, like you’ve always been on your own. You have to keep going forward, until you can’t go forward anymore.

How did I know it had happened? Because of its absence now, because I still felt the loss of it, but I didn’t know how to convey that to Borne then, because he had never lost anything. Not back then. He just kept accumulating, sampling, tasting. He kept gaining parts of the world, while I kept losing them.

Dreams, though, are just one kind of inspiration – no more or less special than something in a newspaper article or from the world around you sparking inspiration.

This was what most people wanted: to be close to but not part of. They didn’t want the fearful unknown of a ‘pristine wilderness.’ They didn’t want a soulless artificial life, either.