Authority Quotes

“A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“So long as you don't tell people you don't know something, they'll probably think you know it.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“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.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“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.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“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”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

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

“I think I would remember forgetting that.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“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.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“It is superstition," she admitted. "But it might be true.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“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.”
― Jeff Vandermeer , Authority

“The words would linger, form in his mind, but never become sound, trapped between his need and his will.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“What was true empathy anyway but sometimes turning away, leaving someone alone?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“Have we been compromised by our own data? The answer is: Of course.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“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.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the woman?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“Become a type, no one saw you. Paranoid thought: What better disguise? But disguise for what?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

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

“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...”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“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?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“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.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“In an emergency, save the scientists.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“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.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“Talking around the edge of a catastrophe. But wasn’t that what people did, if you were still alive?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“Sometimes you had to keep things from people just so they wouldn’t do the first thing that came into their heads.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

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

“He wanted to stay there, at the bar, around people but not involved with them.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“For some reason, Area X was very hard on linguists, almost as hard as it was on priests.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“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.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“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.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority