Frasi di Jeff VanderMeer

“A quell'epoca, io stavo cercando l'oblio, e cercavo in quei volti assenti, anonimi, anche nei più penosamente familiari, una specie di innocua fuga. Una morte che non significasse essere morti.”

“Non volevo le loro voci nella mia mente, le loro idee su di me, le loro storie o i loro problemi personali. Perché avrebbero dovuto volere i miei?”

“E' così che la follia del mondo prova a impossessarti di te: penetrando dall'esterno, costringendoti a vivere nella sua realtà.”

“Per il momento voglio crederti. Voglio crederti perché in realtà non ho scelta. Non ho una teoria migliore.”

“Ci sarà un fuoco che conosce il tuo nome.”

“Be', dipende dai soffitti alti, no? Vedi cose che non esistono. E le cose che vedi sembrano altre cose. Un uccello può essere un pipistrello. Un pipistrello può essere una busta di plastica che vola. Così va il mondo. Vedi una cosa per un'altra. Uccelli-foglie. Pipistrelli-uccelli. Ombre fatte di luci. Rumori accidentali che sembrano più significativi. È sempre così, dovunque vai.”

“Quando ebbe origine l'Area X, le informazioni erano vaghe e confuse, ed è tuttora vero che al mondo pochi sono al corrente della sua esistenza. Il governo, nella sua versione dei fatti, pose l'accento su una catastrofe ecologica circoscritta derivante dalla sperimentazione in campo militare. Come la proverbiale rana nella pentola, che si accorge che l'acqua sta bollendo quando ormai è troppo tardi, la notizia filtrò nel corso di diversi mesi, entrando nella coscienza delle persone un pò alla volta, come parte della quotidiana overdose di chiasso mediatico sulla crescente devastazione ambientale. Nel giro di un paio d'anni diventò materia per i teorici del complotto e altri personaggi di nicchia. Quando mi arruolai e mi venne rilasciato il nullaosta di sicurezza per apprendere come fossero realmente andate le cose, l'idea di un'<> persisteva nella testa di molte persone come una fiaba oscura, un'idea su cui non volevano riflettere troppo. Ammesso che ci riflettessero. Avevano altri problemi.”

“That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.”

“Silence creates its own violence.”

“A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.”

“The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?”

“some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.”

“There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to re-live, certain kinds of connections that are so deep that when broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.”

“Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.”

“We all live in a kind of continuous dream,” I told him. “When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.”

“Who had the bigger burden? The one who had to watch the other person endure or the one who endured?”

“It closely resembles the situation that exists within a mental institution: in tight quarters, in similar garb, dissimilar minds attempt to build a consensus reality that, with a monumental effort of empathy, cannot—can never!—take concrete form.”

“Maybe once, early on, he had convinced himself he could do some good, sometimes even imagined he was a mole, getting close so he could strike a blow. Imagined he was in it to defend Ambergris from the enemies that surrounded it. Imagined he was protecting ordinary citizens.
But the truth was he’d been tired, had stopped caring. Broken down from too much fighting, too many things connected to his past. And when that spark, that impulse, had returned, it was too late: he was trapped.”

“When they give you things, ask yourself why. When you're grateful to them for giving you the things you should have anyway, ask yourself why.”

“A fresh river in a beautiful meadow
Imagined in his mind
The good Painter, who would some day paint it”

“It looked like lively abstract art. Symbols in search of context.”

“But the fact is I don’t care. I haven’t cared since I came here, and I will continue not to care until I leave. With as much of Ambergris smoldering behind me as I can manage.”

“They’ll never forget, never forgive, no matter who the enemy is, son. Better just to start a new life. Be someone else.”

“It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?”

“Strange, but when he closed his eyes he had an image of the hotel above them restored to its former grandeur. A concierge and porter in the lobby. Someone behind the desk waiting to take his key. Sintra in an evening gown. They’d be about to take a motored vehicle to the opera. The streets would be busy with merchants and people coming home from work. The buildings, the storefronts, would be bright and cheery with lights. Like it had been in those mayfly beautiful moments between wars, before the Rising.”

“Unlike the Cult of the Seven-Edged Star, the Church of the Seven Pointed Star believed that God had seven points rather than seven edges. Therefore, rather than worshipping the journey toward self-realization symbolized by the edges, they worshipped the goals of self-realization as symbolized by the points. […] Adherents to the Church of the Seven-pointed Star used swords with sharp points but no edge, while the Cult of the Seven-Edged Star used swords with sharp edges but no point. Alas, edges proved superior to points in most battles fought in the streets of Nicea. Caroline's followers were forced to either commit sacrilege and switch to edges, or become meals for the ever-present saltwater buzzard. Proving, one could say, the point of the edges.”

“An inordinate love of ritual can be harmful to the soul, unless, of course, in times of great crisis, when ritual can protect the soul from fracture.”

“I could not move or speak for several minutes, frozen in the belief that the book itself had changed and was now writing me.”

“I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.”

“The city might be savage, stray dogs might share the streets with grimy urchins whose blank eyes reflected the knowledge that they might soon be covered over, blinded forever, by the same two pennies just begged from some gentleman, and no one in the fuming, fulminous boulevards of trade might know who actually ran Ambergris—or, if anyone ran it at all, but, like a renegade clock, it ran on and wound itself heedless, empowered by the insane weight of its own inertia, the weight of its own citizenry.”