405 Quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

Renaissance artist Gregorio Comanini, has counseled the equivalent of “Live an ordinary, regular life so you can be irregular and brilliant in your creativity.

I mourned the child I had known who was kind and sweet and curious, and yet could not stop killing.

Some things you can be so close to that you never grasp their true nature.

That is why the human race is dying – too limited an imagination. No thought for the consequences.

Writing, for me, is like trying to restart an engine that has rested for years, silent and rusting, in an empty lot – choked with water and dirt, infiltrated by ants and spides and cockroaches. Vines and weeds shoved into it and sprouting of it. A kind of coughing splutter, an eruption of leaves and dust, a voice that sounds a little like mine but is not the same as it was before.

And I am trying my best, too. Even if we don’t always know what that means or how it will play out. You can get caught up in something that’s beyond you, and never understand why.

When you are too close to the center of a mystery there is no way to pull back and see the shape of it entire.

The fish rots from the head.” Fish rotted all over, cell corruption being nonhierarchical and not caste-driven, but point taken.

What was true empathy anyway but sometimes turning away, leaving someone alone?