405 Quotes by Jeff VanderMeer

My voice had a rasp to it, then. I wasn't yet comfortable talking human. My voice had a rasp, and I gazed upon the bison head on the wall and my voice became raspier still. I gazed upon the mossy rock imported from another country, the water feature in the house, and wanted only to return to all fours and drink from the pond. To gaze at the reflection and remember who I was, not who I had become

What was a person but someone who turned monstrous, anyway? What was a person, in Moss's experience, but a kind of demon.

In truth, some demons were once people who did bad things even though they knew better. In truth, people were demons when they didn't know any better. The girl had learned that it hardly mattered in the end,

He wanted to stay there, at the bar, around people but not involved with them.

She knew where it would all lead, what it always led to in human beings--a decision about what to do. What are we going to do? Where do we go from here? How do we move forward? What is our mission now? As if purpose could solve everything, could take the outlines of what was missing and by sheer will invoke it, make it appear, bring it back to life.

Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead?

I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning. I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.

But I am not those people. I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning.

The impatient, feckless reader, posessed of no glimmer of intellectual or historical curiosity, should do an old historian a favor and skip the next few pages, proceeding directly to the Silence itself (Part III). I would assume that, in these horrid modern times, that will include most of you. Of course, those readers least likely to read these footnotes, and thus least likely to appreciate the next few pages, will skip this note and bore themselves upon the ennui of history .