Top 280 Jeff VanderMeer Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

165. “What occurs after revelation and paralysis?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

166. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

168. “The words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

169. “How did I know it had happened? Because of its absence now, because I still felt the loss of it, but I didn’t know how to convey that to Borne then, because he had never lost anything. Not back then. He just kept accumulating, sampling, tasting. He kept gaining parts of the world, while I kept losing them.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

178. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

180. “As I adjusted to the light, the Crawler kept changing at a lightning pace, as if to mock my ability to comprehend it. It was a figure within a series of refracted panes of glass. It was a series of layers in the shape of an archway. It was a great sluglike monster ringed by satellites of even odder creatures. It was a glistening star.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

181. “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

182. “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

183. “But this – this is always the same task over and over, to explore cryptozoology of a crude sort. All that changes is the type of animal, and the only challenge is whether the jaws on a crocodile can reasonably be expected to fit onto a bear. For example.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

184. “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

185. “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

186. “My free will was compromised, if only by the severe temptation of the unknown.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

187. “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

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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

192. “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

193. “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

194. “Throughout all of this, my parents did not forget my education. Not a formal education but the education that mattered. What to value. What to hold on to. What to let go of. What to fight for and what to discard. Where the traps were.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

195. “My singing ability is zilch.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

197. “Sometimes you get a sense of when the truth of things will not be revealed by microscopes.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

199. “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. His father had told him that. “Don’t let them ask questions. You’re already giving them the answers, even if they don’t know it.” “But you’re curious, too,” she said. “Why do you say that?” “You guard the light. And light sees everything.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

200. “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