Top 280 Jeff VanderMeer Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “That love must be unbending. Love must be cruel. Love must not yield. Otherwise, love meant nothing, could do nothing.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

252. “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

253. “Even through the dulling effects of the pill, he wanted to be rid of his itching brain, his ignited skin, the flesh beneath, to in some way become so ethereal and Unbound to the earth that he could unsee, disavow, disavow.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

254. “That tablecloth created by forced labor looks amazing on that table manufactured with formaldehyde in a sweatshop.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

255. “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

256. “We have built so many toxic constructs, we cannot see through the latticework. We have built so many mirrors, there are no windows to shatter.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

257. “You don’t know what to say. You won’t know what to say for a long time. Your reply was so many years ago.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

258. “If he’d had something to say, he should have picked up the phone a long time ago.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

259. “Hadn’t the hummingbird been a kind of miracle? Hadn’t it diminished us not to see this as a miracle and protect it?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

260. “He wanted to stay there, at the bar, around people but not involved with them.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

261. “A theory was forming in his head, like a musical composition he could hum from vague memories but not quite yet name or play.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

262. “Always that riptide compulsion dragging you down into the water, that need to know overriding the fear.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

263. “For some reason, Area X was very hard on linguists, almost as hard as it was on priests.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

264. “Was this first contact, or last contact?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

265. “Courage is no more than learning to live with your fear.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

266. “You don’t know this, ‘cause you’re too young,” came the usual lecture, “but the politicians run all the big scams. Government’s the thief of all time. That’s why it tries so hard to catch thieves – it doesn’t like the competition.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

267. “She had wanted to cover up the core of her decisions by hiding facts or watering them down. But she must have been wise enough to realize, no matter her motivations, no matter the labyrinth, every omission left some sign of its presence.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

268. “His father could have been less honest, because honesty was often just a way of being cruel.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

269. “Perhaps, too, hesitance overtakes me because when I think of writing I glimpse the world I left behind.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

270. “I dearly wished the joy of triangulation, the pounce based on a good ear’s geometry.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

271. “He was walking toward the lighthouse along the trail, but the moon was hemorrhaging blood into its silver circle, and he knew that terrible things must have happened to Earth for the moon to be dying.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

272. “The face that stares back at you from the mirror later in life is so different than when you’re young. There’s a winnowing away and a shutting down. A sense of something having been taken from you and you don’t know exactly what it is, just that it isn’t there anymore.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

273. “What if I said you still hold some of the answers, too.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

274. “Megalodon mad. Megalodon not happy. Megalodon have tantrum.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

275. “Then, too, that other effect of the spores, the brightness in my chest, continued to sculpt me as I walked, and by the time I reached the deserted village that told me I was halfway to the lighthouse, I believed I could have run a marathon. I did not trust that feeling. I felt, in so many ways, that I was being lied to.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

276. “I read the booklet from cover to cover like it was a wonderful meal and I was a starving man. I devoured every word.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

277. “And, if I’m honest, I can’t shake the sense that he is still here, somewhere, even if utterly transformed – in the eye of a dolphin, in the touch of an uprising of moss, anywhere and everywhere.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

278. “In an emergency, save the scientists.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

279. “Talking around the edge of a catastrophe. But wasn’t that what people did, if you were still alive?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

280. “Do you have the new phone yet that someone made continents away because they were forced to and then someone else starved to death because when they mined the components they destroyed all the crop lands and the forest?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

281. “Without context, clinging to those numbers was a form of madness.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

282. “I want to be lost,” Silvina wrote once. “I want to be so far beyond anything that there is no map, and the compass spins wild. And when I come back, if I come back, you need to know I’ve changed, and with that change it means I carry ‘lost’ with me everywhere, even in the heart of the city. That I am lost forever, and that’s how we need to be. So the systems can’t find us, can’t wreck us. So our heads are clear.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

283. “All I could think was, The psychologist lied to us, and suddenly the pressure of her presence far above, guarding the entrance, was pressing down on me in an intolerable way.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

284. “Dead astronauts were no different than living astronauts. Neither could shed their skin. Neither could ever become part of what they journeyed through. Suits were premade coffins. Space was the grave. Better to think of yourself as dead already. There was freedom in that; liberated the mind to roam quadrants farther than the body.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

285. “Imagine these expeditions, and then recognize that they all still exist in Area X in some form, even the ones that came.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

286. “But there would come a terrible and obliterating day when beauty was the only thing that mattered, and it mattered little if the pure part of beauty was blood. And on that day, the globes embedded in the walls hurt to look upon because the price paid for the wonders displayed within was too high. It had become a death cult, under a veneer of what was inevitable and necessary, and anything else was illogical.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

287. “But what was endurance and shared diminishment if not devotion?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

288. “Most had bellies full of plastic. The plastic would grow and grow in their bellies until, years from now, as they mingled, as they drank expensive wine, their bellies would burst and out would come all the plastic, dribbling onto the floor. Pressing cool and bloody against some synthetic floor.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

289. “There was a tear in the sleeve of her blouse. Her pink nail polish had chipped. Details were escaping her. I sympathized.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

290. “Some people believe that it is all right if humans eat creatures from other planets, but when the reverse takes place they raise a hue and cry, call for military assistance, demand punitive expeditions, etc.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

291. “Terroir’s direct translation is ‘a sense of place,’ and what it means is the sum of the effects of a localized environment, inasmuch as they impact the qualities of a particular product. Yes, that can mean wine, but what if you applied these criteria to thinking about Area X?”

— Jeff VanderMeer

292. “Can you really imagine what it was like in those first moments, peering down into that dark space, and seeing that? Perhaps you can. Perhaps you’re staring at it right now.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

293. “The banal drawling frowning speech of men who don’t care about what they’re doing. Until forced to. Who all unawares destroy their own warrens, who poison their own food, convinced of righteousness.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

294. “Names belonged to where we had come from, not to who we were...”

— Jeff VanderMeer

295. “But the trick of the world was to contain all things.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

296. “If we start off on a journey toward Mordor without our bearings, tagging along with people we know nothing about and care nothing about, we might decide to go AWOL.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

297. “You’re going to have to get much smarter very quickly.”

— Jeff VanderMeer

298. “In the end, if you change the enemy enough, if you wear them down, perhaps losing is good enough.”

— Jeff VanderMeer