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.

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.

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

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

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.

Because dead things felt only love for the universe.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

People with packs are people with purpose.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

But what was endurance and shared diminishment if not devotion?

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

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

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.

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,

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anonymity amongst the wreckage of the earth. This is what I sought. And a good pair of boots for when it got cold.

That's the problem with people who are not human

Apparently we'd been richer than we thought, to suffer such continual diminishment and still be alive.

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

I tell him the Company is the past preying on the future—that we are the future.

I lay there, panting, as the skin of Borne around me, the flesh of Borne, went prickly and rigid again and the cilia that rubbed up against me turned into tiny mouths that screamed into my clothes, arms and legs and hair. Borne was screaming silently into his own body because he could not scream on the outside.

Moss the shape of Grayson, all around Grayson, covering Grayson like a second skin. Showing, kiss by kiss, the beauty of Grayson to Grayson, who had never thought herself beautiful. That she was beautiful. All of Moss kissing all of her and Grayson seeing herself through Moss’s eyes. Reborn in that moment.

Alcohol made it hard to tell a demon from a monster.

The sun revealing the vast catafalques of sprawled dead Cities against dry brown rockscapes.

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.

The beetles Wick altered, or made from materials he’d stolen from the Company, didn’t just teach when shoved in your ear; they could also rid you of memories and add memories. People who couldn’t face the present shoved them into their ears so they could experience someone else’s happier memories from long ago, from places that didn’t exist anymore.

Wick spoke in such alchemies and distillations of hope that I couldn’t pick out the facts from the fictions, or which he told me to reassure himself.

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.

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.

What was a person but someone who turned monstrous, anyway?

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.

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

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

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

I never had a country, never had the choice; I was born into one.

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

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.

Am I a person in my right mind?” “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, my standard ploy when I wanted time to think. With my right mind. “If there’s a right mind, then there’s a wrong mind.” “I suppose so. Yes.” “How do you get a wrong mind? Is it borned into you?

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.

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.

Since Borne never displayed any kind of threatening behavior, I never thought to take him as a threat. 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. Instead,

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.

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

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.

I became a wrestler because I loved a certain kind of aggression born, in part, of joy.

My voice had a rasp to it, then. I wasn't yet comfortable talking human. My voice had a rasp, and I gazed upon the bison head on the wall and my voice became raspier still. I gazed upon the mossy rock imported from another country, the water feature in the house, and wanted only to return to all fours and drink from the pond. To gaze at the reflection and remember who I was, not who I had become

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

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.

Can you not distinguish truth from fiction? Or were you never taught the difference?