Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)

by Jeff VanderMeer

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.

One of the great traumas of my life was worrying about the pool. Would the new owners see the beauty and the importance of leaving it as is, or would they destroy it, create unthinking slaughter in honor of the pool’s real function?

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?

I loved him, but I didn’t need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.

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.

Solitude could press down on a person, seem to demand that action be taken.

“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.”