Top 280 Jeff VanderMeer Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Annihilation!” she shrieked at me, flailing in confusion. “Annihilation! Annihilation!” The word seemed more meaningless the more she repeated it, like the cry of a bird with a broken wing.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

102. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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 defiance in that, too.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

115. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

117. “Whenever I write first drafts, I like to maximize the possibility of f-ups, mistakes, mis-written words, digressions, crazy changes in tone, etc. This is why I don’t use outlining software or even a computer and why I spread pages and images and research materials kinda crazy across the table. Never know what’ll happen.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

121. “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

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. “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

124. “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

125. “I mourned the child I had known who was kind and sweet and curious, and yet could not stop killing.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “He wondered why the stewardesses were looking at him funny by mid-flight, and realized he’d been responding to their rote kindness with the intensity of someone who has never experienced courtesy, or never expects to experience it again.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

133. “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

134. “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

135. “There, scuttling across the floor, blind and querulous, is the old cell phone – scrabbling and bulky, trying to get away from you.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

136. “When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

138. “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

139. “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

140. “You wouldn’t understand me even if I made sense.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

142. “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

143. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

145. “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

146. “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

147. “Observation had always meant more to me than interaction.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

148. “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

149. “Do you understand? Nothing thrives without being broken. Nothing exists without being dead first.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

150. “There was no moment like any other moment and yet each moment was the same.”

— Jeff VanderMeer