405 Quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

His father could have been less honest, because honesty was often just a way of being cruel.

In my absence, the surveyor had become a kind of frenzied serial killer of the inanimate.

In unusual situations there can be a comfort in the presence of even someone you think might be your enemy.

The best visual book I can think of is Lynda Barry’s What It Is, but although I refer to it all the time it’s not a creative writing book per se.

Perhaps, too, hesitance overtakes me because when I think of writing I glimpse the world I left behind.

It might be inexplicable. It might be beyond the limits of my senses to capture – or my science or my intellect – but I still believed I was in the presence of some kind of living creature, one that practiced mimicry using my own thoughts. For even then, I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage.

What strange creatures we are, I thought as I stood there. We live, we love, we die with such random joy and grief, excitement and boredom, each mind as individual as a fingerprint, and just as enigmatic. We make up stories to understand ourselves and tell ourselves that they are true, when in fact they only represent an individual impression of one individual fingerprint, no matter how universal we attempt to make them.

But minds find ways to protect themselves, build fortifications, and some of those walls become traps.

We have built so many toxic constructs, we cannot see through the latticework. We have built so many mirrors, there are no windows to shatter.