Jeff VanderMeer Quotes

H.P. Lovecraft is a self-admitted early influence on Ligotti's work. However, in a kind of metaphysical horror story of its own, Ligotti early on subsumed Lovecraft and left his dry husk behind, having taken what sustenance he needed for his own devices. (Most other writers are, by contrast, consumed by Lovecraft when they attempt to devour him.)

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.

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

In my absence, the surveyor had become a kind of frenzied serial killer of the inanimate.

In college, what had always stuck with him in Astronomy 101 was that the first astronomers to think of points of light not as part of a celestial tapestry revolving around the earth but as individual planets had had to wrench their imaginations
and thus their analogies and metaphors
out of a grooved track that had been running through everyone's minds for hundreds and hundreds of years.

What occurs after revelation and paralysis?

I believe the best creative writing lessons live in the specifics.

They'd never really been my friends; I didn't cultivate friends, I had just inherited them from my husband.

Some things you can be so close to that you never grasp their true nature.

There's also a lot of gritty Americana type of bands. I actually have a lot of Britpop on my iPod, too.

Above all, don't think, for what you think happens!

Honesty was often just a way of being cruel.

Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.

He was Control, and he was in control.

What can you do when your five senses are not enough?

The lighthouse teaches me to work hard, to keep my room clean, to be honest and to be nice to people." Then, reflecting, looking down at her feet, "My room is a mess and I lie sometimes and I'm not always nice to people but that's the idea.

We must trust our thoughts while we sleep. We must trust our hunches. We must begin to examine all of those things that we think of as irrational simply because we do not understand them. In other words, we must distrust the rational, the logical, the sane, in an attempt to reach for something higher, for something more worthy.

If I wasn't a writer, I don't know what I'd be. Probably a marine biologist or something.

And man is the greatest killer, the greatest hunter of them all. The whole world of nature knows man for the irresistible master. The roar of his gun, the cunning of his trap, the strength and agility of his arm place all else beneath him. Should man then be treated by nature differently from the other dominants, the army ants and the wasps? It

The gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world.

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.

I like delivering a message, but what I find interesting is providing those details in a different context. Then the readers can make up their minds what it means.

Imagine that this communication sometimes lends a sense of the uncanny to the landscape because of the narcissism of our human gaze, but that it is just part of the natural world here.

He stumbled, almost fell, and decided to sit down, with his back against the tunnel wall, his feet resting against the opposite wall. Roaring out of the morass of pity, terror, happiness, joy, sadness, elation that he had inherited - shooting forth from this void, the single sharp thought: She does not love me. It was almost more than he could take. But he was not the kind of person to fold, to crack, to be broken, and so instead, in those moments after the realization, he bent - and bent, and kept on bending beneath the pressure of this new and terrible knowledge. Soon he would bend into a totally new shape altogether. He welcomed that. He wanted that. Maybe the new thing he would become would no longer hurt, would no longer fear, would no longer look back down into the void and wonder what was left of him.

She did not love him. It made him laugh as he sat there -- great belly laughs that doubled him over in the dust, where he lay for a long moment, recovering. It was funny beyond bearing. He had fought through a dozen terrors all for love of her. And she did not love him. He felt like a character in a holovid - the jester, the clown, the fool.

But I am not those people. I am just the biologist; I don't require any of this to have a deeper meaning.

There's three ways not to see what you don't want to,' she told me. 'One is the coward's way and too damned painful. The other is to close your eyes forever which is the same as the first, when it comes to it. The third is the hardest and the best: You have to make sure only the things you can afford to see come before you.' *

In truth, some demons were once people who did bad things even though they knew better. In truth, people were demons when they didn't know any better. The girl had learned that it hardly mattered in the end,

Maybe all of this was prevarication and excuses and not an afterword at all.

Silence creates its own violence.

My Manager forced me to put my beetle in my own ear, a clear waste and an act that gave me nightmares: of a burning city through which giant carnivorous lizards prowled, eating survivors off of balconies. In one particularly vivid moment, I stood on a ledge as the jaws closed in, heat-swept, and tinged with the smell of rotting flesh. Beetles intended for the tough, tight minds of children should not be used by adults. We still remember a kinder, gentler world.

An inordinate love of ritual can be harmful to the soul, unless, of course, in times of great crisis, when ritual can protect the soul from fracture.

The city might be savage, stray dogs might share the streets with grimy urchins whose blank eyes reflected the knowledge that they might soon be covered over, blinded forever, by the same two pennies just begged from some gentleman, and no one in the fuming, fulminous boulevards of trade might know who actually ran Ambergris-or, if anyone ran it at all, but, like a renegade clock, it ran on and wound itself heedless, empowered by the insane weight of its own inertia, the weight of its own citizenry.

A bird can be a bat. A bat can be a piece of floating plastic bag. Way of the world. To see things as other things.

What's wrong with asking questions?" "Nothing." Everything. Once the questions snuck in, whatever had been certain became uncertain. Questions opened the way for doubt. His father had told him that. "Don't let them ask questions. You're already giving them the answers, even if they don't know it." "But you're curious, too," she said. "Why do you say that?" "You guard the light. And light sees everything.

Film fixes a precise visual image in the viewer's head. In fiction, you just hope you're precise enough to convey the intended effect.

A sudden flash of his partner Wyte, telling him he was compromised, him replying, I don't have an opinion on that.

I've always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn't alone.

Looking for hidden meaning in these papers was the same as looking for hidden meaning in the natural world around us. If it existed, it could be activated only by the eye of the beholder.

The word "Annihilation" was followed by "help induce immediate suicide."

We had all been given self-destruct buttons, but the only one who could push them was dead.

Don't thank people for giving you what you should already have

Sometimes you need to know when to go on to the next thing
for the sake of other people.

And God said, Let there be light. God said that, Saul, and He has come from so far away, and His home is gone, but His purpose remains. Would you deny Him His new kingdom?

Never has a setting been so able to live without the souls traversing it.

He believed a kind of fragmentation had crept into people's minds in the modern era.

Many things receded into the distance behind him, seemed ridiculous or fantastical, or both. Were, at their core, unimportant.

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.

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

Early on, I had thought Wick was reaching for a body across the bed. But, for a long time, he had been reaching for me--for the person called Rachel, who did indeed, in the end, love back the person name Wick.

That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

What would you have done, reader, who has been able to follow me like the Magician followed me, invisible and ever-watchful and without consequence? *

We all live in a kind of continuous dream," I told him. "When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we've taken as reality.

surely you're enough of an armchair philosopher to realize that everything is a reconstruction of something else? Reality is a desperate and evasive creature.

Dreams, though, are just one kind of inspiration - no more or less special than something in a newspaper article or from the world around you sparking inspiration.

Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people's attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.

Yet, I also began to have the sense, fostered in part by the cross-contamination of research, that around the world enclaves that never knew one another - writers who could not have read each other - still had communicated across decades and across vast distances, had stared up at the same shared unfamiliar constellations in the night sky, heard the same unearthly music: a gorgeous choir of unique yet interlocking imaginations and visions and phantoms. At such times, you wonder as both a writer and an editor if you are creating narrative or merely serving as a conduit for what was already there.

Far worse, though, was a low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. 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. As

A whale can injure another whale with its sonar. A whale can speak to another whale across sixty miles of ocean. A whale is as intelligent as we are, just in a way we can't quite measure or understand. Because we're these incredibly blunt instruments.

What strange creatures we are, I thought as I stood there. We live, we love, we die with such random joy and grief, excitement and boredom, each mind as individual as a fingerprint, and just as enigmatic. We make up stories to understand ourselves and tell ourselves that they are true, when in fact they only represent an individual impression of one individual fingerprint, no matter how universal we attempt to make them.

surely by now you realize that you can't trust anyone. But why not take a chance?' *

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. Throughout

God, but the coast here was painfully beautiful, the dark lush greens of the fir trees piercing his brain, the half-raging sky and sea, the surge of salt water against the rocks twinned to the urgent wash of blood through his arteries as he waited for her to kill him or hear him out. Seditious thoughts: there would be nothing too terrible about dying out here, about becoming part of all of this.

What was a person but someone who turned monstrous, anyway? What was a person, in Moss's experience, but a kind of demon.

He went into another bar already drunk, found himself confronted by a ghost. Earlier that night he had glimpsed hints of them
in the curl of a lip that sparked a memory, a flicker of an eyelid, the way someone's hand lingered on a tabletop. Those shoes. That dress. But when you encountered a real ghost
the Thing Entire
it was a shock ... it took your breath. Not away. It didn't take your breath away
your breath wasn't going anywhere. Your breath was still in you, locked up, not of use to you. Took your pulse only to mutter dire predictionsfor the future because the Ghost Entire trapped Control somewhere between the person he had been and the person he had become. And yet it was still just a wraith. Just a woman he had known in high school.

Thieves slept the sleep of the just, their fingers still in someone else's till.

My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books. I've learned that the more I collaborate, like by having someone do a soundtrack to one of my books, the more I see my own work differently.

Sometimes insight into character and dialogue means being silent.

My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.

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.

I've got ... ways of tricking my brain into getting what I need out of it

But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?

One thing about beginning writers is that they don't really always know their own strengths and weaknesses - you might think you're bad at characterization, but that might really be because of some issue you're having with another element, which is making it hard for you to express character in a convincing way.

He drove past a couple of communal basketball hoops and some black and Latino kids on bicycles, who stopped and stared until he was gone. School had been out for a couple of weeks.

Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead?

Control said nothing, had said nothing for quite some time as if he didn't trust words anymore. Or had begun to cherish the answers silence gave him.

One of the most important things as a writing instructor is to provide a lot of different entry points to subjects. To not impose your own personal experience as the One True Way.

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?

And one day, out of Heaven knows what material, he spun the beast a wonderful name, and from that moment it grew into a god and a religion. The Woman indulged in religion once a week at a church near by, and took Conradin with her, but to him the church service was an alien rite in the House of Rimmon. Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the tool-shed, he worshipped with mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wooden hutch where dwelt Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret.

So many differing opinions and philosophies ... are rarely housed under the roof of a single magazine.

The music I listen to while writing is really scene-specific. It's just a great motivator, a way to put myself in the mood.

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.

People with packs are people with purpose.

When you are too close to the center of a mystery there is no way to pull back and see the shape of it entire.

it could take days before you knew that a Vegan round was germinating inside you, and weeks before your body began to blossom into death.

If you don't know your passion, it confuses your mind, not your heart.

There, scuttling across the floor, blind and querulous, is the old cell phone - scrabbling and bulky, trying to get away from you.

It was as if a different person put the key in the ignition and drove away from everything that was familiar. There was no going back now. There was no going forward either. He was going in sideways, sort of, and as frightening as that was, there was the thrill ...

When you think about the complexity of our natural world - plants using quantum mechanics for photosynthesis, for example - a smartphone begins to look like a pretty dumb object.

I hesitated for just a moment. Some part of me wanted to see the creature, after having heard it for so many days. Was it the remnants of the scientist in me, trying to regroup, trying to apply logic when all that mattered was survival? If so, it was a very small part. I ran.

Also, Moss liked to rescue whatever animal or plant needed it. She believed they had earned it.

Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.

I also am not particularly risk-averse - I don't mind jumping off a cliff if I trust the people who've told me they'll catch me at the bottom.

No doubt the detour to deliver Lake had made the sheep late for an appointment.

I am walking forever on the path from the border to base camp. It is taking a long time, and I know it will take even longer to get back. There is no one with me. I am all by myself. The trees are not trees the birds are not birds and I am not me but just something that has been walking for a very long time ...

To paint that horrible scene, something terrible must have befallen the artist.

You may be an unintentional avatar, but you are an avatar nonetheless.

you look you see only bitterness or despair. If all of these conditions and situations apply to you, I recommend a refreshing suicide attempt.

At the time, I was seeking oblivion, and I sought in those blank, anonymous faces, even the most painfully familiar, a kind of benign escape. A death that would not mean being dead.

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit - and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame

We were always finding each other and losing each other and finding each other again, and that was just the way of us.

I do believe very much in the idea of unexpected or 'convulsive' beauty - beauty in the service of liberty.