Top 280 Jeff VanderMeer Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “I do not know how this thorn got here or from how far away it came, but by luck or fate or design at some point it found the lighthouse keeper and did not let him go. How long he had as it remade him, repurposed him, is a mystery. There was no one to observe, to bear witness – until thirty years later a biologist catches a glimpse of him and speculates on what he might have become. Catalyst. Spark. Engine.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

104. “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

105. “That love must be unbending. Love must be cruel. Love must not yield. Otherwise, love meant nothing, could do nothing.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

106. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

109. “Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

110. “Something about the idea of a tower that headed straight down played with a twinned sensation of vertigo and a fascination with structure. I could not tell which part I craved and which I feared, and I kept seeing the inside of nautilus shells and other naturally occurring patterns balanced against a sudden leap off a cliff into the unknown.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

111. “Dreams, though, are just one kind of inspiration – no more or less special than something in a newspaper article or from the world around you sparking inspiration.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

112. “There were no reasons so mighty that they could override the desire to be in accord with the tides and the passage of seasons and the rhythms underlying everything around me.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

113. “I told him point-blank so there would be no mistake: This person he wanted to know better did not exist; I was who I seemed to be from the outside. That would never change.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

114. “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

115. “I loved the late-night slow burn of being out, my mind turning over some problem, some piece of data, while able to appear sociable but still existing apart.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

116. “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

117. “People who asked questions didn’t necessary like being asked questions.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

118. “The world is filled with people who have too much imagination solely because the people around them have too little.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

119. “My loneliness began to be filled with ghosts. That is the worst thing about loneliness, how easily it becomes filled.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

120. “And a soul is just a delusion that lives in the body. No delusion survives death. Death is more honest than that.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

121. “RATS. In sewers. In religions. In words like pirate, desperate, and narrative. Rats infest this glossary as surely as words and mushrooms.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

122. “When they give you things, ask yourself why. When you’re grateful to them for giving you the things you should have anyway, ask yourself why.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “None of us are changing. Everything is fine. Let’s have a picnic.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

128. “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

129. “In unusual situations there can be a comfort in the presence of even someone you think might be your enemy.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

130. “Always, as I looked back, I could see that there had been an almost willful intent to obscure, to misdirect, disguised as concern that we not be frightened or overwhelmed.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

131. “If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

132. “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

133. “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

134. “A falcon screamed down from above and speared one of the two, and peeled off to rise again before the survivor had time to evade or mourn the loss, as if there had always been one and not two. As if there had always only ever been one Strange Bird. But from above, even dying, the companion defiant, urging the last on, and blessing the bird that had caught her, for it was only acting as to its nature and there was no cruelty in that.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

135. “My mother was an overwrought artist who achieved some success but was a little too fond of alcohol and always struggled to find new clients, while my dad the underemployed accountant specialized in schemes to get rich quick that usually brought in nothing. Neither of them seemed to possess the ability to focus on one thing for any length of time. Sometimes it felt as if I had been placed with a family rather than born into one.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

136. “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

137. “What was true empathy anyway but sometimes turning away, leaving someone alone?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

138. “Bodies could be beacons, too, Saul knew. A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way, still shone across the miles as a warning, an invitation, or even just a static signal. People opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes, so you couldn’t see it, because they had no other choice.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

139. “We must love what has been damaged, because everything has been damaged. And to love the damage is to know you care about that world. That you’re still alive. That the world is alive.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

140. “But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

141. “In the city, the line between nightmare and reality was fluid, just as the context of the words killer and death had shifted over time. Perhaps Mord was responsible. Perhaps we all were.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

142. “One of the most important things as a writing instructor is to provide a lot of different entry points to subjects. To not impose your own personal experience as the One True Way.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

143. “Whatever your medium, the goal of any arts practice is to develop a greater set of skills for dealing with challenges. Experience will help you close that gap between your own vision and the piece’s final execution.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

144. “All musical talent is absent in me, to the point of being unable to play board games that require you to hum a tune while others guess what it is, since all my humming sounds the same. Musical instruments have always seemed like alien artifacts to me, even as I really admire anyone who can play one.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

145. “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.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

146. “History has shown us all too often the consequences of dreaming poorly or not at all.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

147. “The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we’ve alive.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

148. “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

149. “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

150. “I believe the best creative writing lessons live in the specifics.”

— Jeff VanderMeer