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'Reality is never unambig-uous, she adds, 'there are dozens and dozens of answers, rebuttals, devastating rejoinders and the like.’

"All language is a surface, and what lies beneath, on the bottom, is more of a rippled riverbed —made so by the force of a poem, for example." She went quiet for a moment before continuing: "The most ridiculous war you can ever wage is the war of one metaphor against another."

The universe was getting bigger, he was sure of it. What else could all these stories be doing with the world?

..books had to accept her existence as reality. And reality was something that couldn't be pushed aside, even by a million books.

“Cats are not coldhearted!” I said. “They’re only protecting their dignity, in case they get rejected. ‘I’ll just reject you first,’ they’re saying.”

“Great, Gail. The old ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ line.”
“No,” I told him. “This is more like ‘It’s not you; it’s the me that I am when I’m with you.’ ”
“What?”
“I used to be…” I began.

I have had a lifelong education in what not to do.

“But nobody wants a divorce,” I told her. “No one goes into a marriage saying, ‘Oh, well, I can always walk out tomorrow if I happen to change my mind.’ ”

Anger feels so much better than sadness. Cleaner, somehow, and more definite. But then when the anger fades, the sadness comes right back again the same as ever.

I felt distinctly hostile toward her. Even though I believed her story, it seemed that in some way she had caused the story, merely by reporting it.

“She couldn’t ‘countenance’ it, could she?”

People don’t tap their watches anymore; have you noticed? Standard wristwatches, I’m talking about. Remember how people used to tap them? My father, for instance. His watch was a Timex with a face as big as a fifty-cent piece, and whenever my mother kept him waiting he would frown down at it and give it a tap. Implying, I suppose now, “Can this possibly be correct? Could it really be this late?”

The brief quote in the Mudder / Old Jim scene about how sound is a parasite needing a host is (partially condensed/adapted) from The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago by François J. Bonnet.

There was comfort in the thought, how if only he could make it across, nothing would change.

..he became a kind of vessel, but also a candle and a flame.

He only said part of that aloud and then defaulted to his own history. Maybe out of guilt. Maybe because he liked sharing it without really sharing it. Maybe because he wanted it out of his soul.

“We all kill what we love and love what we kill,” he said. “We all kill what we despise and want to shut up,” Peng said.

Extra drone: “The natural state of men living side by side is war. The natural process of peace is to side with war. This expedition goes in peace, but with the capacity to wage war.” Did it?

To sleep, to dream, to rise again, someday. And what day would that be, and did it matter?

He could see that now as the dust that wasn’t dust overtook him. The dust was just another kind of language, and perhaps the biggest mistake he’d made was not believing the biologists’ accounts in a literal way.
…
the past could ever defeat the future.

Because that was the distant future, not the past, and the future was where the Rogue came from, a future unbearably uncertain, a place where everything was fluid because of what was coming, and if he had no place here, if he had no way to come to rest, the Tyrant told him, he might once he crossed that divide.

The Rogue’s left eye opened. That cryptic eye, that alien regard. Staring at an organism become other than a man, but sheltering in a man’s body. What was this new thing that looked so old?

There was a way in which it was so real and immediate and yet also felt impossible and drawn out. Maybe he could not contain the feverish intensity of it and also the overwhelming beauty of it, how he could be reduced down to his bones by fear and yet also feel so alive.

A natural silence, then, full of unconsidered life.

Every sorrow might have its day, as the song went, but perhaps joy could, too, sometimes. If joy meant oblivion.

This awful sense of not being able to move, not having a body. Of being at the mercy of the world—dead but still having to live.

..the Southern Reach had run out of ideas, had begun to endlessly recycle, feeding on itself?

If terroir meant a confluence, then the entrance through the border into Area X was the ultimate confluence. It was also the ultimate secret, in that there were no visual records of that entry point available to anyone. Unless you were there, looking across at it, you could never experience it.

"..The point of terroir is that no two areas are the same. That no two wines can be exactly the same because no combination of elements can be exactly the same. That certain varietals cannot occur in certain places. But it requires a deep understanding of a region to teach conclusions."

terror - terroir

"It means the specific characteristics of a place - the geography, geology, and climate that, in concert with the vine's own genetic propensities, can create a startling, deep, original vintage."