Top 280 Jeff VanderMeer Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

203. “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

204. “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

205. “This plastic disk.” “And you throw it.” “Why?” “For fun.” “Team sport.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

206. “But then what? What occurs after revelation and paralysis? Either death or a slow and certain thawing. A returning to the physical world.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

207. “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

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

209. “If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven’t changed instead.” A warning from his mother, once upon a time, delivered as if she’d upended a box of spy-advice fortune cookies and chosen one at random.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

210. “I was alive, and from past experience I knew in time I would forget enough to again pretend that we could someday be free.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

211. “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

212. “Grace was joining him at his request, to assist him in staring out at the swamp while they talked about Area X. Because he’d thought a change of setting – leaving the confines of the concrete coffin – might help soften her animosity. Before he realized just how truly hellish and prehistoric the landscape was, and thus now pre-hysterical as well. Look out upon this mosquito orgy, and warm to me, Grace.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

213. “And so I wept my story into the ocean and the ocean received it.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

215. “Like most men, Wick could not help terror about one thing erupting as anger about something else.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

216. “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

217. “We’re astronauts. All of the expedition members have been astronauts.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

218. “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

219. “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

220. “That is why the human race is dying – too limited an imagination. No thought for the consequences.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

221. “If I could play an instrument, it would probably be a cello or an electric guitar.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

222. “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

223. “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. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left in me.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

224. “There was a gleam in her eye now that I did not like, that promised damage. “I want you to think about something. You might be immune to hypnosis- you might- but what about the veil already in place? What if I removed that veil so you could access your own memories of crossing the border?” the psychologist asked. “Would you like that, Little Flame? Would you like it or would you go mad?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

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

— Jeff VanderMeer

226. “It is superstition,” she admitted. “But it might be true.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

227. “I doubt you will enjoy it. But that is the price of change. Someone always pays.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

228. “I’m not an answer,” she said. “I’m a question.” She might also be a message incarnate, a signal in the flesh, even if she hadn’t yet figured out what story she was supposed to tell.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

229. “He’s a man who measures words as if he had only a few given to him by Fate; too generous a syllable from his lips, and he might fall over dead.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

230. “That is the tragedy of everyday life: when you are in it, you can never see your self clearly.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

231. “He believed a kind of fragmentation had crept into people’s minds in the modern era.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

232. “She liked the feeling of being winnowed down, as if there had been too much of her before, that anything unnecessary had been taken away and what was left was pure.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

233. “Be still that human need. To fill the silence with words.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

234. “After reading the journal, I was left with the comfort of that essential recurring image of my husband putting out to sea in a boat he had rebuilt, out through the crashing surf to the calm just beyond. Of him following the coastline north, alone, seeking in that experience the joy of small moments remembered from happier days. It made me fiercely proud of him. It showed resolve. It showed bravery. It bound him to me in a more intimate way than we had ever seemed to have while together.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

235. “I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

236. “The stories he told became boring to me through repetition, but I understand now that he was just trying to fix that place with the compass of his memories.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

237. “But when you’ve lived in a place this long, no walk can occur solely in the present. Every street, every building, appears to you encrusted with memories, with perspectives that betray your age, your cynicism, your sentimentality, or your lack of feeling where you should feel something.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

238. “During the day I would go to my work worn and tired, cursing the bewitching night and her empty dreams, but as night came my daily life with its bonds and shackles of work would appear a petty, false, ludicrous vanity.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

239. “If I were you, I would never tell ugly stories about ingenious ways of killing people, for you never can tell but that someone at the table may be tired of his or her nearest and dearest.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

240. “But the truth was what Silvina had seen: we were already ghosts. We just kept haunting each other for no reason. Even as we kept awaiting the mortal blow. But there would be no mortal blow, just endless depths.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

241. “If I wasn’t a writer, I don’t know what I’d be. Probably a marine biologist or something.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

242. “Central might catch up to him before he got there. But lurking behind them might be something even darker and more vast, and that was the killing joke. That the thing catching up with all of them would be even less merciful – and would question them until, like a towel wrung dry and then left out in the sun, they were nothing but brittle husks and hollows. Unless.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

243. “A creator who no longer remembered the creation: Wasn’t that one definition of a god?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

244. “But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

245. “But you’re curious, too,” she said. “Why do you say that?” “You guard the light. And light sees everything.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

246. “You forgive if you can forgive yourself. Or live with what you’ve done. If you cannot live with what you’ve done, you cannot live with what others have done either.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

247. “Who had the bigger burden? The one who had to watch the other person endure or the one who endured?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

248. “Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the woman?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

249. “The one thing I always come back to as a writer, what I consider my bedrock, is a lot of charged images that appear in the text.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

250. “You can’t trust how I’ll get somewhere, but you have to trust I know where I’m going. I always know where I’m going.”

— Jeff VanderMeer