Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)

by Jeff VanderMeer

The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.

But I knew from experience how hopeless this pursuit, this attempt to weed out bias, was. 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.

I could not tell which part I craved and which I feared, and I kept seeing the inside of nautilus shells and other naturally occurring patterns balanced against a sudden leap off a cliff into the unknown.

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.

Without context, clinging to those numbers was a form of madness.

Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.

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.

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

trancelike fucking,

Area X, before the ill-defined Event that locked it behind the border thirty years ago and made it subject to so many inexplicable occurrences, had been part of a wilderness that lay adjacent to a military base.

There was a gleam in her eye now that I did not like, that promised damage.

The word “Annihilation” was followed by “help induce immediate suicide.”

We had all been given self-destruct buttons, but the only one who could push them was dead.

You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you.

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

Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation.