Top 280 Jeff VanderMeer Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “But as we climbed back up, I had a moment of vertigo despite being in such an enclosed space, a kind of panic for a moment, in which the walls suddenly had a fleshy aspect to them, as if we traveled inside of the gullet of a beast.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

154. “Also, Moss liked to rescue whatever animal or plant needed it. She believed they had earned it.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

156. “They’d never really been my friends; I didn’t cultivate friends, I had just inherited them from my husband.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

157. “The story that meant the end arrived late one night.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

160. “What occurs after revelation and paralysis?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

161. “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

162. “Perhaps only I could truly make Wick a person, by forgiving him, and if I forgave him, if I showed I forgave him, then maybe we could be people together.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

163. “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

164. “I see music as an aid. It overcomes my internal editor, especially when the music evokes the character or the mood I’m trying to build.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

166. “Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

167. “That if they could not have a fierce joy in their struggle, then they were not truly free but governed by fear and doubt.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

168. “In my absence, the surveyor had become a kind of frenzied serial killer of the inanimate.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

169. “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

170. “It did not care about your belief system, your grasp on reality, the excellence of your analysis or your senses, for the anti-story of the story-creature became story by retelling effortlessly what lived at the core of you.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

171. “I turned to Toine. ‘Don’t they seem calmer?’ ‘Don’t count on it, son. We’ll soon see some odd things if the rum doesn’t kill them first.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

172. “Wick never believed he was a person, was continually being undone by that. Borne was always trying to be a person because I wanted him to be one, because he thought that was right. We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

173. “No doubt the detour to deliver Lake had made the sheep late for an appointment.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

174. “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

175. “Honesty was often just a way of being cruel.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

176. “Become a type, no one saw you. Paranoid thought: What better disguise? But disguise for what?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

177. “You put yourself here. Set this trap for yourself. So if you feel trapped by it now, it is your own fault. – The Director.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

178. “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

179. “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

180. “My singing ability is zilch.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

181. “Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it’s a mulch of all of my past reading.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

182. “What am I? How am I connected? What is my purpose? What is all of this, felt in the flesh? Why is it so beautiful? What is beautiful? Why do I not know? What else don’t I know? When will I know it? Will I ever know? Would knowing be too much?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

183. “Let me tell you what happens when you burn a person’s body, pull out all of his teeth, glue his head to a plate, and shove a bomb in his ear. You become that person’s object of undying hatred.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

184. “I like delivering a message, but what I find interesting is providing those details in a different context. Then the readers can make up their minds what it means.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

185. “Early on, I had thought Wick was reaching for a body across the bed. But, for a long time, he had been reaching for me – for the person called Rachel, who did indeed, in the end, love back the person name Wick.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

186. “Give back to that which gave to you, came the thought, not knowing what I might be feeding, or what it meant for the collection of cells and thoughts that comprised me.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

187. “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

188. “Gerard turned away and ignored the cruelty of the meerkats, tore it from his mind. Lucretia needed a heart.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

189. “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

190. “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

191. “It might be inexplicable. It might be beyond the limits of my senses to capture – or my science or my intellect – but I still believed I was in the presence of some kind of living creature, one that practiced mimicry using my own thoughts. For even then, 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.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

192. “Solitude could press down on a person, seem to demand that action be taken.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

193. “Birds weren’t supposed to levitate or have four mouths or twenty pairs of wings or twelve sets of legs and undulate like a dragon. But, what could you do?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

194. “Take two pictures representing the same subject; one may be dismissed as illustration if it is dominated by the subject and has no other justification but the subject, the other may be called painting if the subject is completely absorbed in the style, which is its own justification, whatever the subject, and has an intrinsic value.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

195. “I think this is an asylum. But so is the rest of the world.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

196. “My mind made them into insects, because my mind wanted stories it could understand, stories that would not frighten it. But still I knew my mind was tricking me, and for a second I loved my mind for the deception.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

197. “How can you tell if a streak of light across the sky is sincere?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

198. “Because dead things felt only love for the universe.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

199. “It’s not superstition,” she said. They all turned to her, swiveling on their stools. “It is superstition,” she admitted. “But it might be true.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

200. “The scrawled letters form words, the words form lines, the lines form a poem. Your eyes scanning across the page give the poem life.”

— Jeff VanderMeer