Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)

by Jeff VanderMeer

Far worse, though, was a low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees.

all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either,

The entrance to the tower leading down exerted a kind of presence, a blank surface that let us write so many things upon it.

I kept seeing the inside of nautilus shells and other naturally occurring patterns balanced against a sudden leap off a cliff into the unknown.

Sunlight came down dappled through the moss and leaves, created archipelagos of light on the flat surface of the entrance.

As if somehow the blankness of the walls fed off of silence, and that something might appear in the spaces between our words if we were not careful.

The air was so clean, so fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always been during the modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself. Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.

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.