Top 280 Jeff VanderMeer Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The world is filled with people who have too much imagination solely because the people around them have too little.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

155. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

164. “Sometimes you had to keep things from people just so they wouldn’t do the first thing that came into their heads.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

166. “What occurs after revelation and paralysis?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

177. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

180. “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

181. “My singing ability is zilch.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— 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. “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

187. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

189. “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

190. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

192. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

194. “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

195. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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