Annihilation Quotes

“Transformations were taking place here, and as much as I had felt part of a “natural” landscape on my trek to the lighthouse, I could not deny that these habitats were transitional in a deeply unnatural way. A perverse sense of relief overtook me; at least now I had proof of something strange happening, along with the brain tissue the anthropologist had taken from the skin of the Crawler.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Every photograph... was a riot of luminous, out-of-focus color.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“I walked outside, into the welter of the stinging water, the gusting pockets of wind.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“If they did, I would just have rebuilt it even better and told everyone about the grim kid who talked to frogs.” I had never talked to the frogs; I despised anthropomorphizing animals.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Ghost bird, do you love me?” he whispered once in the dark, before he left for his expedition training, even though he was the ghost. “Ghost bird, do you need me?” I loved him, but I did not need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated shall walk the world in a bliss of not-knowing …”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“my insides feeling eviscerated,”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“But I was not a domesticated animal. The dirt and grit of a city, the unending wakefulness of it, the crowdedness, the constant light obscuring the stars, the omnipresent gasoline fumes, the thousand ways it presaged our destruction... none of these things appealed to me.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“They'd never really been my friends; I didn't cultivate friends, I had just inherited them from my husband.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“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 …”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien—one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“This person he wanted to know better did not exist; I was who I seemed to be from the outside.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“The trees are not trees the birds are not birds and I am not me but just something that has been walking for a very long time...”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“While we were in that corridor, in that transitional space, nothing could touch us. We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“had tried to ignore the change in the confined space of the tower, but my senses still seemed too acute, too sharp. I was adapting to it, but at times like this, I remembered that just a day ago I had been someone else.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“A religious or superstitious person, someone who believed in angels or in demons, might see it differently. Almost anyone else might see it differently. But I am not those people. I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“The air was so amazingly clean and the vegetation so dense, so richly green, that every spiral of fern seemed designed to make me feel at peace with the world.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“If there had been an endless number of pages, I feared that I would have stood there reading for an eternity, until I fell to the floor and died of thirst or starvation.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Na początku pewnie wydawałam mu się tajemnicza – moja powściągliwość, potrzeba samotności – nawet kiedy już myślał, że przełamał moją obronę. Albo byłam dla niego zagadką do rozwiązania, albo po prostu uznał, że jeśli mnie lepiej pozna, przedrze się głębiej, do tego ją dra w moim wnętrzu, gdzie mieszka inna osoba. […] Powiedziałam mu wprost, żeby nie było niedomówień: osoba, którą chciał lepiej poznać, nie istniała. Byłam naprawdę tylko tym, kim wydawałam się z zewnątrz. I to się nigdy nie zmieni.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Obserwacja zawsze znaczyła więcej niż interakcja.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Some part of me, too, not matter how hard I tried to convince the surveyor to come with me, welcomed the chance to explore alone, to not be dependent on, or worried about, anyone else.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Some part of me, too, no matter how hard I tried to convince the surveyor to come with me, welcomed the chance to explore alone, to not be dependent on, or worried about, anyone else.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation