Dead Astronauts (Borne, #2)

by Jeff Vandermeer

“No one should have to feel responsible for the entire world.”

Sometimes, the duck would distract with the voice of your beloved dead, plucked from your mind, and then dig into your brain like a worm or grub, and try to live in there for a while, eating out your thoughts until you were a husk that twitched and slobbered and spasmed in the sand. At which point, reduced to harmlessness, the duck would stab you with its beak wherever best to place a spigot. Bleed you out while eating you alive.

A creator who no longer remembered the creation: Wasn’t that one definition of a god?

What was a person but someone who turned monstrous, anyway? What was a person, in Moss’s experience, but a kind of demon.

In truth, some demons were once people who did bad things even though they knew better. In truth, people were demons when they didn’t know any better.

Certain incarnations had a grin on their faces, even when they meant to do harm. That was worse than being a true monster, because true monsters didn’t first try to be a friend. And the worst thing was, people wanted to be fooled even as they knew they were being charmed.

Faces limned by the beatific cowl of sea salt and crumbling fossils.

And a soul is just a delusion that lives in the body. No delusion survives death. Death is more honest than that.

Killing is easy. I think that’s why people do it so much.

But, in the end, joy cannot fend off evil. Joy can only remind you why you fight.

There is nothing you cannot hear if the world is quiet enough. And if the world will not be silent, you will have to make yourself silent.

to take the measure of its creator who no longer remembered the creation