Authority Jeff Vandermeer Quotes

A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.

So long as you don't tell people you don't know something, they'll probably think you know it.

We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit artists all want causality.

I think I would remember forgetting that.

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.

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.

It is superstition," she admitted. "But it might be true.

If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven’t changed instead.” A warning from his mother, once upon a time, delivered as if she’d upended a box of spy-advice fortune cookies and chosen one at random.

What was true empathy anyway but sometimes turning away, leaving someone alone?

Have we been compromised by our own data? The answer is: Of course.

The words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will.

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

The fish rots from the head.” Fish rotted all over, cell corruption being nonhierarchical and not caste-driven, but point taken.

Become a type, no one saw you. Paranoid thought: What better disguise? But disguise for what?

In an emergency, save the scientists.

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.

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 dim-lit halls of other places forms that never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who have never seen or been seen. 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

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...

He was also, according to his file, “a first-rate scientist partial to beer,” the kind of mind Control had seen before. It needed dulling to slow it down or to distance itself from the possibility of despair. Beer versus scientist represented a kind of schism between the banality of speech versus the originality of thought. An ongoing battle.

Talking around the edge of a catastrophe. But wasn’t that what people did, if you were still alive?

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead.

You can’t trust how I’ll get somewhere, but you have to trust I know where I’m going. I always know where I’m going.

I’ve been trying to remember this place,” she said, almost plaintively. “I love it here, but the entire time I’ve felt like it was the one remembering me.

Never do something for just one reason.

For some reason, Area X was very hard on linguists, almost as hard as it was on priests.

Sometimes you had to keep things from people just so they wouldn’t do the first thing that came into their heads.

A theory was forming in his head, like a musical composition he could hum from vague memories but not quite yet name or play.

He wanted to stay there, at the bar, around people but not involved with them.

The linguist still believed in the superstition of logic,

It’s not superstition,” she said. They all turned to her, swiveling on their stools. “It is superstition,” she admitted. “But it might be true.

our minds process information almost solely through analogy and categorization, we are often defeated when presented with something that fits no category and lies outside of the realm of our analogies.

Control thought of the theories as “slow death by,” given the context: Slow death by aliens. Slow death by parallel universe. Slow death by malign unknown time-traveling force. Slow death by invasion from an alternate earth. Slow death by wildly divergent technology or the shadow biosphere or symbiosis or iconography or etymology. Death by this and by that. Death by indifference and inference. His favorite: “Surface-dwelling terrestrial organism, previously unknown.” Hiding where all of these years? In a lake?

Topological anomaly? Topological anomaly? Don’t you mean witchcraft? Don’t you mean the end of civilisation? Don’t you mean some kind of spooky thing that we know nothing, absolutely fucking nothing about, to go with everything else we don’t know?

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.

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

How can you tell if a streak of light across the sky is sincere?

What if I said you still hold some of the answers, too.

That placing trust in a word like border had been a mistake, a trap. A slow unraveling of terms unrecognized until too late.

Never skip a step. Skip a step, you’ll find five more new ones waiting ahead of you.” The

This is your last chance, Control. But it wasn't. It was, instead, an immolation. If he was remembered at all, it would be as the harbinger of disaster.

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.

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

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.

If he'd had something to say, he should have picked up the phone a long time ago.

rhinoceroscrutian,

Thank you for your service, for your many years. Now take your weird art and get the fuck out.

once he was cocooned by its embrace, he would be too indoctrinated to perceive it.

Empathy is a losing game,

She had a nice laugh, even when she was using it as a weapon against him.

Terroir’s direct translation is ‘a sense of place,

Grace was joining him at his request, to assist him in staring out at the swamp while they talked about Area X. Because he'd thought a change of setting - leaving the confines of the concrete coffin - might help soften her animosity. Before he realized just how truly hellish and prehistoric the landscape was, and thus now pre-hysterical as well. Look out upon this mosquito orgy, and warm to me, Grace.

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

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.

Terroir’s direct translation is ‘a sense of place,’ and what it means is the sum of the effects of a localized environment, inasmuch as they impact the qualities of a particular product. Yes, that can mean wine, but what if you applied these criteria to thinking about Area X?

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.

Central might catch up to him before he got there. But lurking behind them might be something even darker and more vast, and that was the killing joke. That the thing catching up with all of them would be even less merciful—and would question them until, like a towel wrung dry and then left out in the sun, they were nothing but brittle husks and hollows. Unless

He had been standing there recognizing that there was a draft in the loft. He had been standing there without realizing that it wasn't a draft. Someone was breathing, behind him. Someone was breathing on his neck. The knowledge froze him, froze the cry of "Jesus fuck!" in his throat. He turned with incredible slowness, wishing he could seem like a statue in his turning. Then saw with alarm a large, pale, watery-blue eye that existed against a backdrop of darkness or dark rags shot through with pale flesh, and which resolved into Whitby. Whitby who had been there the entire time, crammed into the shelf right behind Control, at eye-level, bent at the knees, on his side. Breathing in shallow sharp bursts. Staring out. Like something incubating. There, on the shelf.

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.

How could a superstition be true? Maybe “superstition” was what snuck into the gaps, the cracks, when you worked in a place with falling morale and depleted resources. Maybe superstition was what happened when your director went missing in action and your assistant director was still mourning the loss. Maybe that was when you fell back on spells and rituals, the reptile brain saying to the rest of you, “I’ll take it from here. You’ve had your shot.

She’d flown in at his old job up north, which had been gradually reduced from analysis and management to a more reactive and administrative role. Due to his own baggage, he guessed. Due to the fact it always started out well, but then, if he stayed too long … sometimes something happened, something he couldn’t quite define. He became too invested. He became too empathic, or less so. It confused him when it all went to shit because he couldn’t remember the point at which it had started to go bad—was still convinced he could get the formula right.

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.

She had a nice laugh, even as she was using it as a weapon against him.

Someone was breathing. Behind him. Someone was breathing on his neck. The knowledge froze him, froze the cry of "Jesus fuck!" in his throat. He turned with an incredible slowness..

Even as Control said it, he had known that he was also telling her he didn’t mind leaving her there, alone, on the other side.

Something had sharpened her, and he thought it might be memory.

You don’t go home at night with it in your stomach, in your bones. In a few weeks, when you have seen everything, you will have been living with it for a long time, too. You will be just like us—only more so, because it is getting worse.

The look on her face in the empty lot—that blankness—and then, later, in the sessions, the warring of contempt, wildness, casual vulnerability, and vehemence, strength. That had laid him low. That had expanded until it hooked into the whole of him, no part of him not committed.

This false return, this corrupted reunion. This end of everything.

What, if anything, might have made a difference, or if it was always going to happen like this. In this universe. On this day.

At least, that’s what he chose to believe. To have a reason for his packing, and a place to think of as a sanctuary. Or a hiding place.

hair-raising attempts at destruction that included stabbings, careful burnings, deprivation of soil and water, introduction of parasites, general neglect, the emanation of hateful vibes, verbal and physical abuse, and much more.

Here it came. There it was. How comfort led to overreach or to some half reveal of what should be hidden.

Now he wondered why he’d bothered. He disliked having such thoughts because he wasn’t above it all—he was in it—but they were hard to suppress.

When the memory became too faint, too abstract, it would transform itself into an old rotator cuff injury, a pain so thin yet so sharp that he could trace the line of it all the way across his shoulder blade and down his back.

He knew, too, that nukes were locked in on Area X from the nearest silos, military satellites keeping watch from above.

While Control came with whispers about being part of a kind of invisible dynasty, which naturally bred resentment. There was no denying that fact, even if, up close, the dynasty was more like a devolving franchise.

facility devoted to that purpose. She would have been briefed with whatever half-truths the Southern Reach’s command and control deemed useful, based on criteria Control still found arcane, even murky. She would have been subjected to conditioning to make her more receptive to hypnotic suggestion. * * *

The gist had been that institutions, even individual departments in governments, were the concrete embodiments of not just ideas or opinions but also of attitudes and emotions. Like hate or empathy, statements such as “immigrants need to learn English or they’re not really citizens” or “all mental patients deserve our respect.

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.

Desolation tries to colonize you.

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.

He was Control, and he was in control.

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.

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.

There had even been an informal group – the Séance & Science Brigade – dedicated to applying ‘empirical reality to paranormal phenomenon.’ … It was the S&SB that had in effect named Area X, identifying that coast as ‘of particular interest’ and calling it ‘Active Site X’ – a name prominent on their science-inspired tarot cards.

You feel like if they just read the manual first ... If we had a manual, that is.

How many invisible, abstract incantations ruled the world beyond the Southern Reach?

... he de-bugged and de-moused the office ...

In his dreams now, the sky is deep blue with just a twinge of light. He stares from the water up at the cliff far above him. He can see the silhouette of someone peering down at him from the top … can see the way the person leans far over the edge to stare—farther than any human could, yet keeps leaning at a more severe angle, pebbles dislodged and peppering the water around him. While he lies in wait, there, at the bottom of the cliff, swimming vast and unknowable among the other monsters. Waiting in the darkness for the soundless fall, without splash or ripple.

Now he would inhabit the very center of corridors. He would put no hand to any surface. He would believe like a ghost that knew if it made contact with anyone or anything its touch would slide through and that creature would then know that it existed in a state of purgatory.

Time for another drink, somewhere else. A kind of oblivion.

There was not much about the border in her notes, but that white spiral, that enormous space, did not leave him completely. There was an odd synchronicity as he worked that linked the spiral to his mother’s flash of light across the sky, the literal and the metaphoric joined together across an expanse of time and context so vast that only thoughts could bridge the gap.

There is some agreement among us now, reduced though we may be, that to analyze certain things, an object must allow itself to be analyzed, must agree to it. Even if this is just simply by way of some response, some reaction.

Look out upon this mosquito orgy, and warm to me, Grace.

doesn’t care what you do and isn’t affected by your actions? Then you start thinking about dark energy and you go a little nuts.

Jovial" had always been a pretext - the kind of hearty banter that covered up greater and lesser crimes.

Halfway through, he realized that it couldn’t really be Grace and that the words might not even be coming out of his mouth. She unnerved him with the candor of her unblinking gaze. “You don’t have to look like that,” he added. Must’ve said it this time. “Like what?” she said, her head turned a little to the side. “Like a man’s fucked up outta his mind and in my bar? Go to hell.” He’d reared back on his stool at that suggestion, trying to assemble his wits like pieces on a game board. A weight on his chest, in the dark and the light. He’d thought he was smarter. He’d thought she’d gotten mired in old ways of thinking. But it turned out new ways of thinking didn’t help, either. Time for another drink, somewhere else. A kind of oblivion. Then regroup.

In Control’s dreams it is early morning, the sky deep blue with just a twinge of light. He is staring from a cliff down into an abyss, a bay, a cove. It always changes. He can see for miles into the still water. He can see ocean behemoths gliding there, like submarines or bell-shaped orchids or the wide hulls of ships, silent, ever moving, the size of them conveying such a sense of power that he can feel the havoc of their passage even from so far above. He

He had not expected any of it to be beautiful, but it was beautiful.

Someday the fish and the falcon, the fox and the owl, will tell tales, in their way, of this disembodied globe of light and what it contained, all the poison and all the grief that leaked out of it.