Jesse Smith > Jesse's Quotes

“That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“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, Annihilation

“I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning. I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“I loved him, but I didn’t need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“This part I will do alone, leaving you behind. Don’t follow. I’m well beyond you now, and traveling very fast.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“I knew these elements were intended for me and me alone. There were no endearments, but I understood in part because of this restraint. He knew how much I hated words like love.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“I told him point-blank so there would be no mistake: This person he wanted to know better did not exist; I was who I seemed to be from the outside. That would never change.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“It was a test of a fragile trust. It was a test of our curiosity and fascination, which walked side by side with our fear. A test of whether we preferred to be ignorant or unsafe.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“I really wanted to lose myself. People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control, have never wanted control.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Everything was imbued with emotion, awash in it, and I was no longer a biologist but somehow the crest of a wave building and building but never crashing to shore.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Observation had always meant more to me than interaction...My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become part of them with ease.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“I also liked the ocean, and I found staring at it had a calming effect. The air was so clean, so fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always been during the modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself. Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Always, as I looked back, I could see that there had been an almost willful intent to obscure, to misdirect, disguised as concern that we not be frightened or overwhelmed.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“What about the world do you most love?

The fact that I'm not here by myself.

-from interview by Jeff Vandermeer in Clarkesworld magazine”
― Margo Lanagan

“So long as you don't tell people you don't know something, they'll probably think you know it.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“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, Authority

“We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit artists all want causality.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“What was true empathy anyway but sometimes turning away, leaving someone alone?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the woman?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“Bodies could be beacons, too, Saul knew. A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way, still shone across the miles as a warning, an invitation, or even just a static signal. People opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes, so you couldn’t see it, because they had no other choice.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“Sometimes, too, other people gave you their light, and could seem to flicker, to be hardly visible at all, if no one took care of them. Because they’d given you too much and had nothing left for themselves.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“Natural places are no different than human cities. The old exists next to the new. Invasive species integrate with or push out native species. The landscape you see around you is the same as seeing an old cathedral next to a skyscraper.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“If you don't know your passion, it confuses your mind, not your heart.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance