Borne Vandermeer Quotes

We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.

That's the problem with people who are not human. You can't tell how badly they're hurt, or how much they need your help, and until you ask, they don't always know how to tell you.

But, in the end, joy cannot fend off evil. Joy can only remind you why you fight.

The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we've alive.

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

Like most men, Wick could not help terror about one thing erupting as anger about something else.

But minds find ways to protect themselves, build fortifications, and some of those walls become traps.

Do you understand? Nothing thrives without being broken. Nothing exists without being dead first.

Am I a person or a weapon?" Always he wanted to know that he was a person. He just kept giving me different choices so one time I might slip up and say, "You're not a person." "You are a person. But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.

And a soul is just a delusion that lives in the body. No delusion survives death. Death is more honest than that.

I doubt you will enjoy it. But that is the price of change. Someone always pays.

but this was always the test of our relationship. Were we symbiotic or parasitic?

Borne made me happy, but happiness never made anyone less stupid

What is too much to bear? Not being alive is too much to bear.

It was what my mother said sometimes-to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn't mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us. My mother had found that idea comforting.

I was alive, and from past experience I knew in time I would forget enough to again pretend that we could someday be free.

Perhaps only I could truly make Wick a person, by forgiving him, and if I forgave him, if I showed I forgave him, then maybe we could be people together.

It's not being hurt that hurts,' Borne said.

A creator who no longer remembered the creation: Wasn’t that one definition of a god?

What am I? How am I connected? What is my purpose? What is all of this, felt in the flesh? Why is it so beautiful? What is beautiful? Why do I not know? What else don't I know? When will I know it? Will I ever know? Would knowing be too much?

Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.

People with packs are people with purpose.

That tablecloth created by forced labor looks amazing on that table manufactured with formaldehyde in a sweatshop.

You wouldn’t understand me even if I made sense.

There was no moment like any other moment and yet each moment was the same.

If I went rummaging through your carcass, would I find you?

Be still that human need. To fill the silence with words.

Because dead things felt only love for the universe.

You forgive if you can forgive yourself. Or live with what you've done. If you cannot live with what you've done, you cannot live with what others have done either.

That if they could not have a fierce joy in their struggle, then they were not truly free but governed by fear and doubt.

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.

I would never know anyone like Borne ever again, and even if I saw Borne again it would never be the same as when we lived together in the Balcony Cliffs, the way we’d run down the corridors and punched holes in the walls and joked and laughed and I’d taught him new words that he’d held there in his mind like jewels, and repeated over and over until he knew them better than I did.

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.

The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we’re alive.

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

In the end, if you change the enemy enough, if you wear them down, perhaps losing is good enough.

As the storm washed over them and they huddled there not knowing their futures until it had passed and all was still. None of them ready. Thought they were in the middle. Not the end.

The banal drawling frowning speech of men who don’t care about what they’re doing. Until forced to. Who all unawares destroy their own warrens, who poison their own food, convinced of righteousness.

They killed us with traps. They killed us with poisons. They killed us with snares. They killed us with guns. They killed us with knives. They strangled us. They trampled us. They tore us apart with hounds. They baited steel-jawed traps. They starved us out. They burned us alive. They withheld water. They killed all our prey. They slit our throats. They filled in our burrows. They drowned us. They trampled us under horses’ hooves. They bred us for fur and bludgeoned us to death. They kept us in cages so small with so many we burst apart. They suffocated us with poison gas. They strangled us. They put us in sacks and beat us with clubs. They cut out our tongues so we bled to death. They skinned us alive. They detonated rock and stopped our hearts all unknowing. They swung us by our tails and smashed our skulls against stones. They murdered us in each and every year. They murdered us on each and every day.

Dead astronauts were no different than living astronauts. Neither could shed their skin. Neither could ever become part of what they journeyed through. Suits were premade coffins. Space was the grave. Better to think of yourself as dead already. There was freedom in that; liberated the mind to roam quadrants farther than the body.

There comes a moment when you witness events so epic you don’t know how to place them in the cosmos or in relation to the normal workings of a day. Worse, when these events recur, at an ever greater magnitude, in a cascade of what you have never seen before and do not know how to classify. Troubling because each time you acclimate, you move on, and, if this continues, there is a mundane grandeur to the scale that renders certain events beyond rebuke or judgment, horror or wonder, or even the grasp of history.

That’s the problem with people who are not human. You can’t tell how badly they’re hurt, or how much they need your help, and until you ask, they don’t always know how to tell you.

I mourned the child I had known who was kind and sweet and curious, and yet could not stop killing.

That love must be unbending. Love must be cruel. Love must not yield. Otherwise, love meant nothing, could do nothing.

But what was endurance and shared diminishment if not devotion?

I dearly wished the joy of triangulation, the pounce based on a good ear’s geometry.

But why should they have a leader? Why should they not roam like wild things? For they were wild things. Why should they have a purpose? For they were wild things.

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

The body did not exist separate from the soul because the soul didn’t exist.

This plastic disk.” “And you throw it.” “Why?” “For fun.” “Team sport.

But by then, whenever this was, the Strange Bird did not want to live, or did not know she could live, and that was the same thing in the end.

She liked the feeling of being winnowed down, as if there had been too much of her before, that anything unnecessary had been taken away and what was left was pure.

In the city, the line between nightmare and reality was fluid, just as the context of the words killer and death had shifted over time. Perhaps Mord was responsible. Perhaps we all were.

Everything added to her and everything taken away had led to that moment and from her perch she had radiated love for every animal she could not help, with nothing left over for any human being.

But there would come a terrible and obliterating day when beauty was the only thing that mattered, and it mattered little if the pure part of beauty was blood. And on that day, the globes embedded in the walls hurt to look upon because the price paid for the wonders displayed within was too high. It had become a death cult, under a veneer of what was inevitable and necessary, and anything else was illogical.

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,

Perhaps because trees did not resist. Trees fell over on their own accord, sometimes, as if to prove their love for the ax. The chainsaw that felled most of them just completed a trees own inevitable thought.

Do you have the new phone yet that someone made continents away because they were forced to and then someone else starved to death because when they mined the components they destroyed all the crop lands and the forest?

So she sang back silently to them, as a comfort, there in the cell, and when the moonlight lay thick and bright against the gritty cheek of the sand dune, the foxes would gambol and prance for the sheer delight of it and beckon her to join them, would let her into their minds that she might know what it was to gambol and to prance on those four legs, then these four legs, to see the world from a fox’s level. It was almost like flying. Almost.

Or maybe I was trying to break out of my skin, thinking about how my parents had been actors in roles and the roles were to be my father and mother-and the reason I could see those as roles was that in such extremes, in private, they must have let down their guard and expressed their doubts, their fears, the extent of their despair or hopelessness as our situation worsened and the world revealed the outlines of its true harshness. But because of me, there were whole eternities of hours each day when they had to pretend otherwise, and how I wish I could go back and tell them not to do that. That all I wanted was to see their true selves, remember their true selves.

Throughout all of this, my parents did not forget my education. Not a formal education but the education that mattered. What to value. What to hold on to. What to let go of. What to fight for and what to discard. Where the traps were.

Wick never believed he was a person, was continually being undone by that. Borne was always trying to be a person because I wanted him to be one, because he thought that was right. We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means

The way back was harder, and no getting around that-no truth I learned struggling back, except that life is struggle. It placed me in some gray realm beyond, a landscape of exertion and anguish. I had nothing left to give, and yet still I had something left it give.

Most had bellies full of plastic. The plastic would grow and grow in their bellies until, years from now, as they mingled, as they drank expensive wine, their bellies would burst and out would come all the plastic, dribbling onto the floor. Pressing cool and bloody against some synthetic floor.

A glittering reef of stars, spread out phosphorescent, and each one might have life on it, planets revolving around them. There might even be people like us, looking up at the night sky. It was what my mother said sometimes-to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn't mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us. My mother had found that idea comforting.

How did I know it had happened? Because of its absence now, because I still felt the loss of it, but I didn’t know how to convey that to Borne then, because he had never lost anything. Not back then. He just kept accumulating, sampling, tasting. He kept gaining parts of the world, while I kept losing them.

Did you ever need to live on as I needed you to live on? Did you ever had a need so great that the vestiges of your mission existed even if you weren't sure you did? Did you ever believe you were a ghost? Did you ever reach a point when you weren't sure purpose existed anymore? And yet, still. you were here.

My mother was an overwrought artist who achieved some success but was a little too fond of alcohol and always struggled to find new clients, while my dad the underemployed accountant specialized in schemes to get rich quick that usually brought in nothing. Neither of them seemed to possess the ability to focus on one thing for any length of time. Sometimes it felt as if I had been placed with a family rather than born into one.

A falcon screamed down from above and speared one of the two, and peeled off to rise again before the survivor had time to evade or mourn the loss, as if there had always been one and not two. As if there had always only ever been one Strange Bird. But from above, even dying, the companion defiant, urging the last on, and blessing the bird that had caught her, for it was only acting as to its nature and there was no cruelty in that.

He would study any number of topics and had no real preferences, his many eyes enthusiastically moving back and forth as he read the pages at a steady clip. I don't believe he needed light, or eyes, to read, but I know he liked to mimic what he saw me doing. Perhaps he even thought it was polite to seem to need light, to seem to need eyes.

There were five of them, and four had traded their eyes for green-gold wasps that curled into their sockets and compounded their vision. Claws graced their hands like sharp commas. Scales at their throats burned red when they breathed. One wing sighed bellows-like out of the naked back of the shortest, the one who still had slate-gray human eyes. After a while, I'd wished he had wasps instead.

Nor could I stop thinking of the perfect little biotech slaves that had paraded themselves around my special cake in the fancy restaurant. In my mind, they kept spiraling that cake for years, as it decayed into black mold and then nothing, and they had to keep trudging around that cake, around and around, singing, until they died in mid-step and their flesh rotted and then faded away, revealing their sad, delicate skeletons.

Even calling Borne a “he” began to feel faintly ridiculous as he didn’t exhibit the aggression or self-absorption I expected from most males.

then in that moment that I’d begun to love him. Because he didn’t see the world like I saw the world. He didn’t see the traps. Because he made me rethink even simple words like disgusting or beautiful.

Теперь Борн узнал, что его можно ранить. Что он уязвим. Кончилась беззаботная детская радость. Кончились дурачества. Потому что теперь в нем затаится определенное знание: он может умереть.

«Мир сломан, я не знаю, как его починить»

...обманчивая власть раскаяния, заставляющая нас считать, что силой своего убеждения, силой чувств мы можем все исправить, хотя на самом деле мы ничего не можем.

Бывают моменты, когда события, свидетелем которых ты являешься, настолько огромны, что ты просто не можешь найти им место в своей повседневной жизни. Хуже, когда эти события повторяются снова и снова, становясь все огромнее, своего рода водопад, подобного которому ты никогда не встречал и не знаешь, к чему его отнести. Что особенно во всем этом неприятно, это то, что постепенно ты привыкаешь, перестаешь обращать внимание. И когда эти явления продолжают повторяться, само их величие приобретает для тебя черты повседневности, сам их масштаб делает невозможными любые попытки ими восхищаться, ужасаться или судить. И понять их значение.

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

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? *

Our minds were down below, being feasted on by the bears.

What a nothing you made out of the world you were given.

Life is still hard, but it is fair, and there is more joy in it that doesn’t feast on heartache.

Rachel, Rachel—what am I?” The strobe of colors felt like a smile or a flash of relief. “That’s a tough one, Borne. I don’t know what you are.” “Am I a squirrel?” “I don’t think so.” “Am I a fish?” “Definitely not!” “Am I a … fox?! Secretly raised as a common animal. But really a royal fox. Most royal of foxes. First among fox-kind.” I

Rachel, Rachel—what am I?” The strobe of colors felt like a smile or a flash of relief. “That’s a tough one, Borne. I don’t know what you are.” “Am I a squirrel?” “I don’t think so.” “Am I a fish?” “Definitely not!” “Am I a … fox?! Secretly raised as a common animal. But really a royal fox. Most royal of foxes. First among fox-kind.” I shook my head. “No, not a fox.

There had never been a time when all the people everywhere lived in peace. No one had ever had a lasting peace without ignoring atrocity or history, which meant it wasn’t lasting at all. Which meant we were an irrational species.

I see it, I taste it. All the contamination. The low-level radiation, the storage sites, the runoff. Every place is sick—there’s sick everywhere

The things we say to each other, thinking they are so important to say, and yet later regret, that become a part of you no matter how hard you push them away, even as you can’t stop thinking about them.

But that's incredible," Borne said, quietly. "That's amazing. That's devastating.

All of these people he had let into his life, and who had turned against him. Or had changed. Or had simply been acting to their nature, and Wick had come into focus for them for a time and then drifted out of focus again.

But, in the end, joy cannot fend off evil. Joy can only remind you why you fight.

You prefer discarded things, the way they bring something or someone with them. Almost as if they bring friends. Company.

We have had all the adventures one lifetime could endure, and it is fine that no one knows but us.

I went back over our conversations in my memory, to see if I could translate them into some other meaning. But it was too late. They are what they are. They mean what they meant, and I know I misremember some of them anyway - and that pains me.

He kills the stars.

But all of those points of light above are also suns, even farther away, and they all have worlds, too." "All of them? Every single one? But that's like hundreds." "Thousands. Maybe millions." "But that's incredible," Borne said, quietly. "That's amazing. That's devastating.

You have to open your heart to as much as you can. As much as you can stand. No matter the cost.

Or as he said sometimes, the system abhors source, makes its mapping into a maze, a mockery, and the more you think you understand it, the more you are colonized by it. And lost.

I was a ghost. I was a ghost.

Borne wasn't even a killer as I was a killer, but someone who killed the innocent and tried to call them guilty.