Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)

by Jeff VanderMeer

Desolation tries to colonize 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.

pretending often leads to becoming a reasonable facsimile of what you mimic, even if only from a distance.

There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.

So we fit back then, in our odd way. We clicked, by being opposites, and took pride in the idea that this made us strong. We reveled in this construct so much, for so long, that it was a wave that did not break until after we were married … and then it destroyed us over time, in depressingly familiar ways.

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

I have never done well in cities, even though I lived in one by necessity—because my husband needed to be there, because the best jobs for me were there, because I had self-destructed when I’d had opportunities in the field. 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.

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

There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.