Jeff VanderMeer Quotes & Sayings

No doubt the detour to deliver Lake had made the sheep late for an appointment. — Jeff VanderMeer

But how is that different from any other godforsaken stretch of coast half off the grid?" There were still dozens of them all across the country. Places that were poison to real-estate agents, with little infrastructure and a long history of distrust of the government. — Jeff VanderMeer

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. — Jeff VanderMeer

I also am not particularly risk-averse - I don't mind jumping off a cliff if I trust the people who've told me they'll catch me at the bottom. — Jeff VanderMeer

If I could play an instrument, it would probably be a cello or an electric guitar. — Jeff VanderMeer

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. — Jeff VanderMeer

I believe the best creative writing lessons live in the specifics. — Jeff VanderMeer

Control thought of the theories as "slow death by," given the context: Slow death by aliens. Slow death by parallel universe. Slow death by malign unknown time-traveling force. Slow death by invasion from an alternate earth. Slow death by wildly divergent technology or the shadow biosphere or symbiosis or iconography or etymology. Death by this and by that. Death by indifference and inference. His favorite: "Surface-dwelling terrestrial organism, previously unknown." Hiding where all of these years? In a lake? — Jeff VanderMeer

My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books. I've learned that the more I collaborate, like by having someone do a soundtrack to one of my books, the more I see my own work differently. — Jeff VanderMeer

Never be tricked by the small print! It's right there in front of you, right there in front of you, and you can't even see it and then suddenly it makes you notice it! And I tell you, once you've seen it it's got you! — Jeff VanderMeer

As I left the landing, I had the peculiar thought that I was not the first to pocket the photo, that someone would always come behind to replace it, to circle the lighthouse keeper again. — Jeff VanderMeer

Control said nothing, had said nothing for quite some time as if he didn't trust words anymore. Or had begun to cherish the answers silence gave him. — Jeff VanderMeer

The Thing about people who wanted to show you things was that sometimes their interest in granting you knowledge was laced with a little voyeuristic sadism. They were waiting for the Look or the Reaction, and they didn't care what it was so long as it inflicted some kind of discomfort. — Jeff VanderMeer

He drank deeply from his orange juice - really drank to savor it so that for a minute or two nothing existed in the house but his enjoyment. — Jeff VanderMeer

Some things came to you late, but late was better than never. — Jeff VanderMeer

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

You may be an unintentional avatar, but you are an avatar nonetheless. — Jeff VanderMeer

And one day, out of Heaven knows what material, he spun the beast a wonderful name, and from that moment it grew into a god and a religion. The Woman indulged in religion once a week at a church near by, and took Conradin with her, but to him the church service was an alien rite in the House of Rimmon. Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the tool-shed, he worshipped with mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wooden hutch where dwelt Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret. — Jeff VanderMeer

There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to re-live, certain kinds of connections that are so deep that when broken you feel the snap of the link inside you. — Jeff VanderMeer

I hesitated for just a moment. Some part of me wanted to see the creature, after having heard it for so many days. Was it the remnants of the scientist in me, trying to regroup, trying to apply logic when all that mattered was survival? If so, it was a very small part. I ran. — Jeff VanderMeer

It was what my mother said sometimes-to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn't mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us. My mother had found that idea comforting. — 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. — Jeff VanderMeer

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

He was Control, and he was in control. — Jeff VanderMeer

Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people's attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy. — Jeff VanderMeer

What's wrong with asking questions?" "Nothing." Everything. Once the questions snuck in, whatever had been certain became uncertain. Questions opened the way for doubt. His father had told him that. "Don't let them ask questions. You're already giving them the answers, even if they don't know it." "But you're curious, too," she said. "Why do you say that?" "You guard the light. And light sees everything. — Jeff VanderMeer

Looking for hidden meaning in these papers was the same as looking for hidden meaning in the natural world around us. If it existed, it could be activated only by the eye of the beholder. — Jeff VanderMeer

I really wanted to lose myself. People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control, have never wanted control. — Jeff VanderMeer

Angela Carter's fiction blew me away and really instilled a passion for writing, bolstered by Vladimir Nabokov. But in general, I can't point to any one thing. I just always loved books and writing. — Jeff VanderMeer

He that feels pure, let him cast the first stone. — Jeff VanderMeer

you look you see only bitterness or despair. If all of these conditions and situations apply to you, I recommend a refreshing suicide attempt. — Jeff VanderMeer

The rain had abated. The sails were hoisted, and the barrels we had placed everywhere filled with that precious gift from the sky. Calm reigned during a botched dawn in which pitch black shaded off into dark grey. Isolated sunrays pierced the clouds to shed light on a terribly flat sea like a lake of tar. Far, very far away, cracked muted peals of thunder. The storm approached quickly, lightning streaking the leaden ceiling while the sea shivered and quivered under a fresh wind. — Jeff VanderMeer

his head burst in a blizzard of seeds that hung in the lamplight and drifted slowly to the ground like a tiny division of poison paratroopers. — Jeff VanderMeer

Even a dream as inspiration doesn't mean anything unless you then find that it's sparked an actual story with a plot. — Jeff VanderMeer

Ever since she had become my Manager, my raises had become smaller and smaller. The last raise had been a huge leech shaped like a helmet. It was meant to suck all the bad thoughts out of your head. It smelled like bacon, which seemed promising. I had invited Mord and Leer over to my apartment and we'd fried it up in a skillet. I'd gotten a week's worth of sandwiches out of it. — Jeff VanderMeer

The words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will. — Jeff VanderMeer

He drove past a couple of communal basketball hoops and some black and Latino kids on bicycles, who stopped and stared until he was gone. School had been out for a couple of weeks. — Jeff VanderMeer

At the time, I was seeking oblivion, and I sought in those blank, anonymous faces, even the most painfully familiar, a kind of benign escape. A death that would not mean being dead. — Jeff VanderMeer

I do believe very much in the idea of unexpected or 'convulsive' beauty - beauty in the service of liberty. — Jeff VanderMeer

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

If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven't changed instead. A warning from his mother, once upon a time, delivered as if she'd upended a box of spy-advice fortune cookies and chosen one at random. — Jeff VanderMeer

There's three ways not to see what you don't want to,' she told me. 'One is the coward's way and too damned painful. The other is to close your eyes forever which is the same as the first, when it comes to it. The third is the hardest and the best: You have to make sure only the things you can afford to see come before you.' * — Jeff VanderMeer

I am walking forever on the path from the border to base camp. It is taking a long time, and I know it will take even longer to get back. There is no one with me. I am all by myself. The trees are not trees the birds are not birds and I am not me but just something that has been walking for a very long time ... — Jeff VanderMeer

That is why the human race is dying - too limited an imagination. No thought for the consequences. — Jeff VanderMeer

Gerard turned away and ignored the cruelty of the meerkats, tore it from his mind. Lucretia needed a heart. — Jeff VanderMeer

There is always a charge, of one kind or another. * — Jeff VanderMeer

Imagine that this communication sometimes lends a sense of the uncanny to the landscape because of the narcissism of our human gaze, but that it is just part of the natural world here. — Jeff VanderMeer

What can you do when your five senses are not enough? — Jeff VanderMeer

The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible? — Jeff VanderMeer

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. — Jeff VanderMeer

I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary. — Jeff VanderMeer

This part I will do alone, leaving you behind. Don't follow. I'm well beyond you now, and traveling very fast. — Jeff VanderMeer

Sometimes you need to know when to go on to the next thing
for the sake of other people. — Jeff VanderMeer

There's also a lot of gritty Americana type of bands. I actually have a lot of Britpop on my iPod, too. — Jeff VanderMeer

Would that not be the final humbling of the human condition? That the trees and birds, the fox and the rabbit, the wolf and the deer ... reach a point at which they do not even notice us, as we are transformed. — Jeff VanderMeer

I leaned in closer, like a fool, like someone who had not had months of survival training or ever studied biology. Someone tricked into thinking that words should be read. — Jeff VanderMeer

The world is a mysterious place and the very limitation of our senses in exploring it means we are sometimes aware of there being something beyond our ken. — Jeff VanderMeer

So many differing opinions and philosophies ... are rarely housed under the roof of a single magazine. — Jeff VanderMeer

This is your last chance, Control. But it wasn't. It was, instead, an immolation. If he was remembered at all, it would be as the harbinger of disaster. — Jeff VanderMeer

Hunt game? With pearl-handled revolvers?" I asked, incredulous. "Isn't that a bit ... I dunno ... fancy? Do I just run out into the forest with my pearl-handled revolvers, or do I invite some deer to a cocktail party and then gun them down? — Jeff VanderMeer

When you think about the complexity of our natural world - plants using quantum mechanics for photosynthesis, for example - a smartphone begins to look like a pretty dumb object. — Jeff VanderMeer

You can be deeply non-serious and still focused, disciplined, and on task. — Jeff VanderMeer

If I wasn't a writer, I don't know what I'd be. Probably a marine biologist or something. — Jeff VanderMeer

You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what's left to you. — Jeff VanderMeer

Subtle or bold, The Weird acknowledges that our search for understanding about worlds beyond our own cannot always be found in science or religion and thus becomes an alternative path for exploration of the numinous. — Jeff VanderMeer

...your antagonist is a hero in their own mind... p.192 — Jeff VanderMeer

It is superstition," she admitted. "But it might be true. — Jeff VanderMeer

The longer I looked the more certain I became that these figures were real and living, though perhaps not according to the standards that the camera and the biologist would insist upon. — Jeff VanderMeer

I am writing this sitting in the waterlogged lobby of a rotting, half-finished condominium complex. I am surrounded by cavorting freshwater seals and have two pearl-handled revolvers in my lap, a bottle of vodka in my right hand, a human body in the freezer in the kitchens behind me, and a rather large displaced rockhopper penguin staring me in the face. — Jeff VanderMeer

You feel like if they just read the manual first ... If we had a manual, that is. — Jeff VanderMeer

They'd never really been my friends; I didn't cultivate friends, I had just inherited them from my husband. — Jeff VanderMeer

I aimed my flashlight at the ground - and leapt back, gasping. Incredibly, a human face seemed to be rising out of the earth. — Jeff VanderMeer

There's nothing to this world,' he said, 'but what our senses tell us about it, and all I can do is the best I can on that information. — Jeff VanderMeer

I've got ... ways of tricking my brain into getting what I need out of it — Jeff VanderMeer

H.P. Lovecraft is a self-admitted early influence on Ligotti's work. However, in a kind of metaphysical horror story of its own, Ligotti early on subsumed Lovecraft and left his dry husk behind, having taken what sustenance he needed for his own devices. (Most other writers are, by contrast, consumed by Lovecraft when they attempt to devour him.) — Jeff VanderMeer

He made no distinction between pornography and science fiction, often wondering out loud why they confiscated the one and not the other. — Jeff VanderMeer

The stories he told became boring to me through repetition, but I understand now that he was just trying to fix that place with the compass of his memories. Throughout — Jeff VanderMeer

The city might be savage, stray dogs might share the streets with grimy urchins whose blank eyes reflected the knowledge that they might soon be covered over, blinded forever, by the same two pennies just begged from some gentleman, and no one in the fuming, fulminous boulevards of trade might know who actually ran Ambergris-or, if anyone ran it at all, but, like a renegade clock, it ran on and wound itself heedless, empowered by the insane weight of its own inertia, the weight of its own citizenry. — Jeff VanderMeer

That was the time calculated by the barber who based his estimate on the length of his customers' stubble. — 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. — Jeff VanderMeer

People who asked questions didn't necessary like being asked questions. — Jeff VanderMeer

We all just want to people, and none of us know what that really means. — Jeff VanderMeer

Don't thank people for giving you what you should already have — Jeff VanderMeer

One thing about beginning writers is that they don't really always know their own strengths and weaknesses - you might think you're bad at characterization, but that might really be because of some issue you're having with another element, which is making it hard for you to express character in a convincing way. — Jeff VanderMeer

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. — Jeff VanderMeer

I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no. — Jeff VanderMeer

The idea that a dysfunctional thought could take root in a vacuum, the individual anonymous and wraithlike, unknowable because, especially at first, he or she had no interaction with other people. Because more and more in the modern Internet era you came across isolated instances of a mind virus or worm: brains that self-washed, bathed in received ideologies that came down from on high, ideologies that could remain dormant or hidden for years, silent as death until they struck. Almost anything could happen now, and did. — Jeff VanderMeer

I looked not for shooting stars but for fixed ones, and I would try to imagine what kind of life lived in those celestial tidal pools so far from us. — Jeff VanderMeer

To paint that horrible scene, something terrible must have befallen the artist. — Jeff VanderMeer

It was a test of a fragile trust. It was a test of our curiosity and fascination, which walked side by side with our fear. A test of whether we preferred to be ignorant or unsafe. — Jeff VanderMeer

Grace was joining him at his request, to assist him in staring out at the swamp while they talked about Area X. Because he'd thought a change of setting - leaving the confines of the concrete coffin - might help soften her animosity. Before he realized just how truly hellish and prehistoric the landscape was, and thus now pre-hysterical as well. Look out upon this mosquito orgy, and warm to me, Grace. — Jeff VanderMeer

Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective - even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth. — Jeff VanderMeer

Whitby's often silent, and when he speaks his questions and concerns do nothing to alleviate the pressure of that gloom, the sense of intent eternal and everlasting that occupies this stretch of land, that predates Area X. The still, standing water, the oppressive blackness of a sky in which the blue peers down through the trees at startling intervals, only to be taken away again, and only ever seeming to come to you from a thousand miles off anyway. — Jeff VanderMeer

Far worse, though, was a low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you. As — Jeff VanderMeer

The gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world. — Jeff VanderMeer

I've always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn't alone. — Jeff VanderMeer

Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the woman? — Jeff VanderMeer

Yet, I also began to have the sense, fostered in part by the cross-contamination of research, that around the world enclaves that never knew one another - writers who could not have read each other - still had communicated across decades and across vast distances, had stared up at the same shared unfamiliar constellations in the night sky, heard the same unearthly music: a gorgeous choir of unique yet interlocking imaginations and visions and phantoms. At such times, you wonder as both a writer and an editor if you are creating narrative or merely serving as a conduit for what was already there. — Jeff VanderMeer

My parents read to me a lot as a kid, and I started writing very early, probably spurred on by Aesop's fables. Then they gave me The Lord of the Rings way too early for me to fully understand what I was reading, which was actually kind of cool. It was almost better - comprehension's overrated when you're reading. — Jeff VanderMeer

Imbuing fiction with a life that extends beyond the last word is in some ways the goal: the ending that goes beyond the ending in the reader's mind, so invested are they in the story. — Jeff VanderMeer