Top 100 Jeff Vandermeer Quotes
#1. What about the world do you most love?
The fact that I'm not here by myself.
-from interview by Jeff Vandermeer in Clarkesworld magazine
Margo Lanagan
#2. But I am not those people. I am just the biologist; I don't require any of this to have a deeper meaning.
Jeff VanderMeer
#3. 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
#6. Never has a setting been so able to live without the souls traversing it.
Jeff VanderMeer
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. I do believe very much in the idea of unexpected or 'convulsive' beauty - beauty in the service of liberty.
Jeff VanderMeer
#10. 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
#11. A bird can be a bat. A bat can be a piece of floating plastic bag. Way of the world. To see things as other things.
Jeff VanderMeer
#12. So many differing opinions and philosophies ... are rarely housed under the roof of a single magazine.
Jeff VanderMeer
#13. That is why the human race is dying - too limited an imagination. No thought for the consequences.
Jeff VanderMeer
#14. Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.
Jeff VanderMeer
#15. In my absence, the surveyor had become a kind of frenzied serial killer of the inanimate.
Jeff VanderMeer
#16. Who had the bigger burden? The one who had to watch the other person endure or the one who endured?
Jeff VanderMeer
#17. 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
#20. 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
#21. I always try to be alert to the potential for repetition, for a decaying orbit with regard to my use of technique, etc.
Jeff VanderMeer
#24. If he'd had something to say, he should have picked up the phone a long time ago.
Jeff VanderMeer
#25. That is the tragedy of everyday life: when you are in it, you can never see your self clearly.
Jeff VanderMeer
#27. The music I listen to while writing is really scene-specific. It's just a great motivator, a way to put myself in the mood.
Jeff VanderMeer
#28. There are countless things in this vast universe that humankind does not know.
Jeff VanderMeer
#29. You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.
Jeff VanderMeer
#30. 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
#31. The words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will.
Jeff VanderMeer
#32. Observation had always meant more to me than interaction.
Jeff VanderMeer
#33. the trees were putting on their September garments, brown and red and yellow,
Jeff VanderMeer
#34. Position yourself to succeed by doing the other things in your life that rejuvenate you. You can create little islands of time away from your novel that will help preserve your balance. Exhaustion will affect both your writing's quality and your productivity.
Jeff VanderMeer
#35. He'd said they were studying the "taywah" or "terror" of the region, even when he'd spelled it out as t-e-r-r-o-i-r.
Jeff VanderMeer
#36. Agency in fiction has to exist in the context of the worldview. Otherwise agency is not just meaningless or unconvincing, it is often laughable. Unfortunately, agency is often thoughtlessly given to characters who would not have it in reality. p.189
Jeff VanderMeer
#37. 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
#38. Sometimes insight into character and dialogue means being silent.
Jeff VanderMeer
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan.
Jeff VanderMeer
#43. 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.
Jeff VanderMeer
#44. As Shakespeare points out, it is common for people to die. Going
Jeff VanderMeer
#45. Angela Carter, Leonora Carrington, even nonsurrealists like Kafka and Nabokov - writers like these, who create paths between the firmly grounded and flights of fantasy, are my personal North Star.
Jeff VanderMeer
#46. When Dradin stopped running he found himself on the fringe of the religious quarter, next to an emaciated macadamia salesman who cracked jokes like nuts.
Jeff VanderMeer
#47. 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. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left in me.
Jeff VanderMeer
#48. And God said, Let there be light. God said that, Saul, and He has come from so far away, and His home is gone, but His purpose remains. Would you deny Him His new kingdom?
Jeff VanderMeer
#50. Across all of the universe of creative lying, whether you believe in the art of it or the entertainment of it, or both, a certain foundation in the basics allows you to kind of jump out into the unknown.
Jeff VanderMeer
#51. I like to go through the zine sections of local bookstores when on the road and have found a lot of really great kind of underground stuff that way. It all feeds into everything else.
Jeff VanderMeer
#52. All of the things that wore you down, even as that was balanced by the electric feeling of being on the side of a border where you knew things no one else knew.
Jeff VanderMeer
#53. Cross-pollination and "contamination" is really important to the health of fiction, and sometimes it's a literal conversation, too, in that writers who might never otherwise meet and talk do so because of our anthologies.
Jeff VanderMeer
#54. How many invisible, abstract incantations ruled the world beyond the Southern Reach?
Jeff VanderMeer
#55. 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
#56. It is less than five hundred years since an entire half of the world was discovered. It is less than two hundred years since the discovery of the last continent. The sciences of chemistry and physics go back scarcely one century.
Jeff VanderMeer
#57. If people were not by nature insane and resistant to self-improvement or therapy,
Jeff VanderMeer
#58. 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
#59. I didn't answer her. All I could have said was I don't know, a sentence that was becoming a kind of witness to our own ignorance or incompetence. Or both.
Jeff VanderMeer
#60. No doubt the detour to deliver Lake had made the sheep late for an appointment.
Jeff VanderMeer
#61. 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
#62. Accidents and acts of God don't mean a thing, unless they're followed later by acts of will.
Jeff VanderMeer
#63. The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don't know if I accept everything even now. I don't know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there's a defiance in that, too.
Jeff VanderMeer
#64. An inordinate love of ritual can be harmful to the soul, unless, of course, in times of great crisis, when ritual can protect the soul from fracture.
Jeff VanderMeer
#65. If I were you, I would never tell ugly stories about ingenious ways of killing people, for you never can tell but that someone at the table may be tired of his or her nearest and dearest.
Jeff VanderMeer
#66. The stories in Get In Trouble confirm once again that Kelly Link is a modern virtuoso of the form-playful and subversive required reading for anyone who loves short fiction.
Jeff VanderMeer
#67. We all just want to people, and none of us know what that really means.
Jeff VanderMeer
#68. ...your antagonist is a hero in their own mind... p.192
Jeff VanderMeer
#69. It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?
Jeff VanderMeer
#70. Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.
Jeff VanderMeer
#71. Because our minds process information solely through analogy and categorization, we are often defeated when presented with something that fits no category.
Jeff VanderMeer
#72. I knew these elements were intended for me and me alone. There were no endearments, but I understood in part because of this restraint. He knew how much I hated words like love.
Jeff VanderMeer
#73. a television bomb would instantly blind you with its eruption of images as its icons burned through your flesh and imprinted themselves on your bones in tiny hieroglyphs that recounted the brief history of the body's destruction.
Jeff VanderMeer
#74. It was as if a different person put the key in the ignition and drove away from everything that was familiar. There was no going back now. There was no going forward either. He was going in sideways, sort of, and as frightening as that was, there was the thrill ...
Jeff VanderMeer
#75. 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
#76. A whale can injure another whale with its sonar. A whale can speak to another whale across sixty miles of ocean. A whale is as intelligent as we are, just in a way we can't quite measure or understand. Because we're these incredibly blunt instruments.
Jeff VanderMeer
#77. For some reason, Area X was very hard on linguists, almost as hard as it was on priests.
Jeff VanderMeer
#78. If I could play an instrument, it would probably be a cello or an electric guitar.
Jeff VanderMeer
#79. He believed a kind of fragmentation had crept into people's minds in the modern era.
Jeff VanderMeer
#80. 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
#81. But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?
Jeff VanderMeer
#82. 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
#83. the atmosphere of the town was an artificial creation whose existence relied on the subtle attentions of its inhabitants.
Jeff VanderMeer
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead?
Jeff VanderMeer
#87. That's the problem with people who are not human. You can't tell how badly they're hurt, or how much they need your help, and until you ask, they don't always know how to tell you.
Jeff VanderMeer
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the woman?
Jeff VanderMeer
#91. it could take days before you knew that a Vegan round was germinating inside you, and weeks before your body began to blossom into death.
Jeff VanderMeer
#92. He made no distinction between pornography and science fiction, often wondering out loud why they confiscated the one and not the other.
Jeff VanderMeer
#93. I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.
Jeff VanderMeer
#94. The one thing I always come back to as a writer, what I consider my bedrock, is a lot of charged images that appear in the text.
Jeff VanderMeer
#95. They'd never really been my friends; I didn't cultivate friends, I had just inherited them from my husband.
Jeff VanderMeer
#96. Become a type, no one saw you. Paranoid thought: What better disguise? But disguise for what?
Jeff VanderMeer
#97. 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
#98. History has shown us all too often the consequences of dreaming poorly or not at all.
Jeff VanderMeer
#99. 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.
Jeff VanderMeer
#100. We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination.
Jeff VanderMeer
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