405 Quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

Borne made me happy, but happiness never made anyone less stupid.

As I adjusted to the light, the Crawler kept changing at a lightning pace, as if to mock my ability to comprehend it. It was a figure within a series of refracted panes of glass. It was a series of layers in the shape of an archway. It was a great sluglike monster ringed by satellites of even odder creatures. It was a glistening star.

If you don’t know your passion, it confuses your mind, not your heart.

The lighthouse teaches me to work hard, to keep my room clean, to be honest and to be nice to people.” Then, reflecting, looking down at her feet, “My room is a mess and I lie sometimes and I’m not always nice to people but that’s the idea.

Everything was imbued with emotion, awash in it, and I was no longer a biologist but somehow the crest of a wave building and building but never crashing to shore.

What if an infection was a message, a brightness a kind of symphony? As a defense? An odd form of communication? If so, the message had not been received, would probably never be received, the message buried in the transformation itself. Having to reach for such banal answers because of a lack of imagination, because human beings couldn’t even put themselves in the mind of a cormorant or an owl or a whale or a bumblebee.

Observation had always meant more to me than interaction.

Give back to that which gave to you, came the thought, not knowing what I might be feeding, or what it meant for the collection of cells and thoughts that comprised me.

The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we’ve alive.