Jeff VanderMeer QUOTES

43 " Hard to describe what those next years felt like to live through. Except as a hollowing out, a loss beyond repair...even as it kept begging to be repaired. While the promise of what had been so very close haunted me. In so many ways.

"So much in motion, such energy, it disguised the decay of things, the incremental rot. How much was hollowed out."

Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation, and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories. You couldn't figure out if collapse was a cliff or a gentle slope because all the mental constructs obscured it. Multinationals kept their monopolies, shed jobs or even their identities, but most did not go under. Governments became more autocratic, on average.

Here was fine, there was a disaster. But here was just a different kind of disaster. A thick mist drenched in the smoke of flares that kept curling back on us. Why fight a mist if all that lay ahead was more of the same?

Those of us who survived the pandemic, and all the rest, passed through so many different worlds. Like time travelers. Some of us lived in the past. Some in the present, some in an unknowable future. If you lived in the past, you disbelieved the conflagration reflected in the eyes of those already looking back at you. You mistook the pity and anger, how they despised you. How, rightly, they despised you.

So we stitched our way through what remained of life. The wounds deeper. The disconnect higher.

The shock that shattered our bones yet left us standing. "

― Jeff VanderMeer , Hummingbird Salamander

45 " Бывают моменты, когда события, свидетелем которых ты являешься, настолько огромны, что ты просто не можешь найти им место в своей повседневной жизни. Хуже, когда эти события повторяются снова и снова, становясь все огромнее, своего рода водопад, подобного которому ты никогда не встречал и не знаешь, к чему его отнести. Что особенно во всем этом неприятно, это то, что постепенно ты привыкаешь, перестаешь обращать внимание. И когда эти явления продолжают повторяться, само их величие приобретает для тебя черты повседневности, сам их масштаб делает невозможными любые попытки ими восхищаться, ужасаться или судить. И понять их значение. "

― Jeff VanderMeer , Borne (Borne, #1)

47 " What does the border look like?” A child’s question. A question whose answer means nothing. There is nothing but border. There is no border. "

― Jeff VanderMeer , Acceptance

49 " Whatever we think of the border, it’s important to recognise it as a limitation of Area X. "

― Jeff VanderMeer , Acceptance

51 " I’d wake in the morning, my head fuzzy, sometimes with someone I knew but who was a stranger just leaving, and realize I was one day closer to the end of it all. "

― Jeff VanderMeer , Annihilation

53 " A ghost bird might be a hawk in one place, a crow in another, depending on the context. The sparrow that shot up into the blue sky one morning might transform mid-flight into an osprey the next. This was the way of things here. 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