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The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer

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

artists, causality, chance, universe

Jeff VanderMeer

Control said nothing, had said nothing for quite some time as if he didn’t trust words anymore. Or had begun to cherish the answers silence gave him.

Jeff VanderMeer

I didn’t answer her. All I could have said was I don’t know, a sentence that was becoming a kind of witness to our own ignorance or incompetence. Or both.

answers, i-don-t-know, ignorance, incompetence

Jeff VanderMeer

I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.

biology, environmental-factors, promise, promises

Jeff VanderMeer

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.

brainwashing, internet, terrorism

Jeff VanderMeer

I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left in me.

biology, camouflage, impression, logic

Jeff VanderMeer

He was Control, and he was in control.

Jeff VanderMeer

Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead?

bodies, burial, carry-on, death, regret

Jeff VanderMeer

They’d never really been my friends; I didn’t cultivate friends, I had just inherited them from my husband.

Jeff VanderMeer

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.

love, relationship

Jeff VanderMeer

It was a test of a fragile trust. It was a test of our curiosity and fascination, which walked side by side with our fear. A test of whether we preferred to be ignorant or unsafe.

curiosity, fear, ignorance, saftey, trust

Jeff VanderMeer

I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning. I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.

answers, meaning-of-life, methodology, motivation, questions, speculation