“You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Acceptance
“She knew where it would all lead, what it always led to in human beings--a decision about what to do. What are we going to do? Where do we go from here? How do we move forward? What is our mission now? As if purpose could solve everything, could take the outlines of what was missing and by sheer will invoke it, make it appear, bring it back to life.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“If you don't know your passion, it confuses your mind, not your heart.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“Would that not be the final humbling of the human condition? That the trees and birds, the fox and the rabbit, the wolf and the deer... reach a point at which they do not even notice us, as we are transformed.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“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.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“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.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“People who asked questions didn't necessary like being asked questions.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“Some things you can be so close to that you never grasp their true nature.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“Honesty was often just a way of being cruel.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“Never has a setting been so able to live without the souls traversing it.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“What are we going to do? Where do we go from here? How do we move forward? What is our mission now? As if purpose could solve everything, could take the outlines of what was missing and by sheer will invoke it, make it appear, bring it back to life.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“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?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“There's nothing to this world,' he said, 'but what our senses tell us about it, and all I can do is the best I can on that information.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“Lowry, drunk out of his mind at his going-away party, headed for Central, only three years after you had been hired, had said, “How goddamn boring. Fucking boring if they win. If we gotta live in that world.” As if people would be living in “that world” at all, which wasn’t what any of the evidence foretold, or kept foretelling, as if there were nothing worse than being bored and the only point of the world people already lived in was to find ways to combat boredom, to make sure “all the moments,” as Whitby put it when he went on about parallel universes, might be accounted for in some way, so minds wouldn’t fill up with emptiness that they bifurcated simply to have more capacity to be bored.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“I’m not an answer,” she said. “I’m a question.” She might also be a message incarnate, a signal in the flesh, even if she hadn’t yet figured out what story she was supposed to tell.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don’t know if I accept everything even now. I don’t know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there’s a defiance in that, too.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“Some things came to you late, but late was better than never.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“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 shown 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, quote from Acceptance
“You're on your own, like you've always been on your own. You have to keep going forward, until you can't go forward anymore.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower. Didn’t”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“There, scuttling across the floor, blind and querulous, is the old cell phone—scrabbling and bulky, trying to get away from you.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“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.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“Perché, dopo averla rinviata in così tanti modi, credo che la mia trasformazione sarà più radicale del previsto, che potrei diventare davvero qualcosa di simile alla creatura lamentosa. A quel punto vedrò la luna vera?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“Whitby’s often silent, and when he speaks his questions and concerns do nothing to alleviate the pressure of that gloom, the sense of intent eternal and everlasting that occupies this stretch of land, that predates Area X. The still, standing water, the oppressive blackness of a sky in which the blue peers down through the trees at startling intervals, only to be taken away again, and only ever seeming to come to you from a thousand miles off anyway.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
“that as a kind of trap, a way to become distracted … and still the sense that whatever will disorient and destabilize lies below you, deciding whether to be seen or remain unseen—around a corner, beyond the horizon, and with each new empty reveal, each curve of the steps lit by the blue flames of dead words, toward an unknown become shy, you are wound ever tighter, even though there is nothing to be seen.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance
Jeff VanderMeer
Born place: in The United States
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“I think people see what they want to see... But think about it: if you'd lost someone you love, wouldn't you give almost anything to have the chance to see them again?”
― Jennifer McMahon, quote from The Winter People
“I’d been to ten schools in the last three years.”
― Shelby Bach, quote from Of Giants and Ice
“Number 40: Love is worth the risk.”
― Alice Kuipers, quote from 40 Things I Want To Tell You
“Sani's family lived in a well-kept double-wide in an otherwise less-than-spiff trailer park outside of Sawmill.”
― John Scalzi, quote from Lock In
“Be the best you can be, in the worst of circumstances, even when no one is watching.”
― Devdutt Pattanaik, quote from Sita: An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayana
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Becoming HumanBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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