Jeff VanderMeer · 704 pages
Rating: (4.4K votes)
“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.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from City of Saints and Madmen
“Perhaps [he had] persevered for too long, in the face of too many obstacles, his hair proof of his tenacity - the stark black streaked with white or, in certain light, stark white shot through with black, each strand of white attributable to the jungle fever (so cold it burned, his skin glacial), each strand of black a testament to being alive afterwards.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from City of Saints and Madmen
“If people were not by nature insane and resistant to self-improvement or therapy,”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from City of Saints and Madmen
“No doubt the detour to deliver Lake had made the sheep late for an appointment.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from City of Saints and Madmen
“Take two pictures representing the same subject; one may be dismissed as illustration if it is dominated by the subject and has no other justification but the subject, the other may be called painting if the subject is completely absorbed in the style, which is its own justification, whatever the subject, and has an intrinsic value.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from City of Saints and Madmen
“When Dradin stopped running he found himself on the fringe of the religious quarter, next to an emaciated macadamia salesman who cracked jokes like nuts.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from City of Saints and Madmen
“they were treated as though they were angels sent from God to save them from everlasting destruction—therefore,”
― quote from The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ
“Man’s inhumanity to man, unleashed, was an obscenity, and that obscenity was each person’s own private responsibility.”
― Rosamunde Pilcher, quote from The Shell Seekers
“If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume that writing manages to go beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through his mental circuits. Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing, a power based on something that goes beyond the individual. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
“I hate to say it, but shit really does happen. You just have to get over it. Beat the hell out of it by doing things that make you happy.”
― J.A. Redmerski, quote from The Edge of Never
“...how sorry she felt for white people, who couldn't do any of this (sit talking with friends and growing melons) and who were always dashing around and worrying themselves over things that were going to happen anyway. What use was it having all the money if you could never sit still or just watch your cattle, and yet they did not know it. Every so often you met a white person who understood, who realized how things really were; but these people were few and far between and the other white people often treated them with suspicion. ”
― Alexander McCall Smith, quote from The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
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