Home > Work > Authority
1 " The Thing about people who wanted to show you things was that sometimes their interest in granting you knowledge was laced with a little voyeuristic sadism. They were waiting for the Look or the Reaction, and they didn’t care what it was so long as it inflicted some kind of discomfort. "
― Jeff VanderMeer , Authority
2 " We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit artists all want causality. "
3 " Never do something for just one reason. "
4 " 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 "
5 " He was Control, and he was in control. "
6 " The idea that a dysfunctional thought could take root in a vacuum, the individual anonymous and wraithlike, unknowable because, especially at first, he or she had no interaction with other people. Because more and more in the modern Internet era you came across isolated instances of a mind virus or worm: brains that self-washed, bathed in received ideologies that came down from on high, ideologies that could remain dormant or hidden for years, silent as death until they struck. Almost anything could happen now, and did. "
7 " numinous "
8 " phantasmagoria "
9 " At the end of their conversation, for no good reason, he told a joke. “What’s brown and sticky?” “I know that one,” the Voice said. “A stick.” “A turd.” Click. "
10 " Because Control knew that belief in a scientific process only took you so far. The ziggurats of illogic erected by your average domestic terrorist as he or she bought the fertiliser or made a detonator took on their own teetering momentum and power. When those towers crashed to the earth, they still existed whole in the perpetrator’s mind, and everyone else’s too – just for different reasons. "
11 " All of the things that wore you down, even as that was balanced by the electric feeling of being on the side of a border where you knew things no one else knew. "
12 " He wondered why the stewardesses were looking at him funny by mid-flight, and realized he'd been responding to their rote kindness with the intensity of someone who has never experienced courtesy, or never expects to experience it again. "
13 " For some reason, Area X was very hard on linguists, almost as hard as it was on priests. "
14 " You feel like if they just read the manual first ... If we had a manual, that is. "
15 " But how is that different from any other godforsaken stretch of coast half off the grid?” There were still dozens of them all across the country. Places that were poison to real-estate agents, with little infrastructure and a long history of distrust of the government. "
16 " He wanted to stay there, at the bar, around people but not involved with them. "
17 " How many invisible, abstract incantations ruled the world beyond the Southern Reach? "
18 " A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle. "
19 " So long as you don't tell people you don't know something, they'll probably think you know it. "
20 " This was what most people wanted: to be close to but not part of. They didn't want the fearful unknown of a 'pristine wilderness.' They didn't want a soulless artificial life, either. "
