Top 280 Jeff VanderMeer Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

52. “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

53. “Observation had always meant more to me than interaction... My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become part of them with ease.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

55. “What is too much to bear? Not being alive is too much to bear.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

59. “The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower. Didn’t.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

60. “The terrible thing, the thought I cannot dislodge after all I have seen, is that I can no longer say with conviction that this is a bad thing. Not when looking at the pristine nature of Area X and then the world beyond, which we have altered so much.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

61. “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

62. “I also liked the ocean, and I found staring at it had a calming effect. The air was so clean, so fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always been during the modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself. Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

63. “There’s also a lot of gritty Americana type of bands. I actually have a lot of Britpop on my iPod, too.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

64. “I am sure of the here and now, this moment, and the next. I am sure of my past.” That was ghost bird’s castle keep, and it was inviolate.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

65. “Sometimes, too, other people gave you their light, and could seem to flicker, to be hardly visible at all, if no one took care of them. Because they’d given you too much and had nothing left for themselves.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

67. “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

68. “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

69. “This was really the only thing I discovered in him after his return: a deep and unending solitude, as if he had been granted a gift that he didn’t know what to do with. A gift that was poison to him and eventually killed him. But would it have killed me?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

71. “We must trust our thoughts while we sleep. We must trust our hunches. We must begin to examine all of those things that we think of as irrational simply because we do not understand them. In other words, we must distrust the rational, the logical, the sane, in an attempt to reach for something higher, for something more worthy.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

72. “So she sang back silently to them, as a comfort, there in the cell, and when the moonlight lay thick and bright against the gritty cheek of the sand dune, the foxes would gambol and prance for the sheer delight of it and beckon her to join them, would let her into their minds that she might know what it was to gambol and to prance on those four legs, then these four legs, to see the world from a fox’s level. It was almost like flying. Almost.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

73. “The only solution to the environment is neglect, which requires our collapse.” A sentence the biologist had excised from her thesis, but one that had burned bright in her mind, and now in Ghost Bird’s, where, even analyzed and kept at arm’s length like all received memories, it had a kind of power.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

74. “I loved him, but I didn’t need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

75. “He that feels pure, let him cast the first stone.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

76. “Was I in the end stages of some prolonged form of annihilation?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

77. “We all live in a kind of continuous dream,” I told him. “When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

78. “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

79. “What strange creatures we are, I thought as I stood there. We live, we love, we die with such random joy and grief, excitement and boredom, each mind as individual as a fingerprint, and just as enigmatic. We make up stories to understand ourselves and tell ourselves that they are true, when in fact they only represent an individual impression of one individual fingerprint, no matter how universal we attempt to make them.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

80. “Nothing we brought with us is from the present. Not our clothes, not our shoes. It’s all old junk. Restored crap. We’ve been living in the past this whole time. In some sort of reenactment. And why?” She made a derisive sound. “You don’t even know why.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

81. “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

82. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

84. “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

85. “What does the border look like?” A child’s question. A question whose answer means nothing. There is nothing but border. There is no border.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

86. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

88. “The best visual book I can think of is Lynda Barry’s What It Is, but although I refer to it all the time it’s not a creative writing book per se.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

89. “But minds find ways to protect themselves, build fortifications, and some of those walls become traps.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

90. “I would never know anyone like Borne ever again, and even if I saw Borne again it would never be the same as when we lived together in the Balcony Cliffs, the way we’d run down the corridors and punched holes in the walls and joked and laughed and I’d taught him new words that he’d held there in his mind like jewels, and repeated over and over until he knew them better than I did.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

91. “Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, perhaps automatic, need to assimilate and to mimic. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

92. “We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

93. “Some things came to you late, but late was better than never.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

94. “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

95. “I do believe very much in the idea of unexpected or “convulsive” beauty – beauty in the service of liberty.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

96. “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.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

97. “Hay preguntas que pueden acabar contigo si la respuesta se te niega el suficiente tiempo.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

98. “People with packs are people with purpose.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

99. “So long as you don’t tell people you don’t know something, they’ll probably think you know it.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

100. “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