Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation
9 quotes
"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."
"That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality."
"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."
"They’d never really been my friends; I didn’t cultivate friends, I had just inherited them from my husband."
"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."
"I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no."
"I looked not for shooting stars but for fixed ones, and I would try to imagine what kind of life lived in those celestial tidal pools so far from us."
"Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead?"
"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."