The Weird Quotes

“During the day I would go to my work worn and tired, cursing the bewitching night and her empty dreams, but as night came my daily life with its bonds and shackles of work would appear a petty, false, ludicrous vanity.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“I felt as if the whole house was like a living organism slowly and imperceptibly digesting me by the action of some stupefying gastric juice.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“The gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“If I were you, I would never tell ugly stories about ingenious ways of killing people, for you never can tell but that someone at the table may be tired of his or her nearest and dearest.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“The things that disturb us at midnight are negligible at 9 a.m.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Fictions

“Courage is no more than learning to live with your fear.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“a girl as pale as the moon’s reflection in a rain barrel.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“And one day, out of Heaven knows what material, he spun the beast a wonderful name, and from that moment it grew into a god and a religion. The Woman indulged in religion once a week at a church near by, and took Conradin with her, but to him the church service was an alien rite in the House of Rimmon. Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the tool-shed, he worshipped with mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wooden hutch where dwelt Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“The rain had abated. The sails were hoisted, and the barrels we had placed everywhere filled with that precious gift from the sky. Calm reigned during a botched dawn in which pitch black shaded off into dark grey. Isolated sunrays pierced the clouds to shed light on a terribly flat sea like a lake of tar. Far, very far away, cracked muted peals of thunder. The storm approached quickly, lightning streaking the leaden ceiling while the sea shivered and quivered under a fresh wind.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“We were almost out of water, and we were wise not to eat much of the flour left. An image of the man I had killed assaulted me. On his forehead, a red flower grew and grew until it became enormous. The petals parted, and from the centre a stem sprouted suddenly. Like a pointed finger, it approached slowly, ready to suck me into the dead man’s skull. I screamed, and I must have screamed aloud because a hand shook me. ‘Hey, there, ship’s boy. Shut up.’ Toine’s face loomed over me. Although his voice sounded gruff, compassion shone in his eyes. The dawn was as black as muddy dirt. The stars had fled but the night seemed to last forever. A silence as heavy as the heat hung in the air. The crew must have been wallowing in rum.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“I turned to Toine. ‘Don’t they seem calmer?’ ‘Don’t count on it, son. We’ll soon see some odd things if the rum doesn’t kill them first.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“Above all, don’t think, for what you think happens!”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“the longer I looked the more certain I became that these figures were real and living, though perhaps not according to the standards that the camera and the biologist would insist upon.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“He that feels pure, let him cast the first stone.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“subtle or bold, The Weird acknowledges that our search for understanding about worlds beyond our own cannot always be found in science or religion and thus becomes an alternative path for exploration of the numinous.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“Much happens in the meadow; it is a stage for fervent activity and a theatre of war. But everything serves just one purpose: immortality. The insects who are pursuing their own interests there do not know that they are at the same time fulfilling the flowers’ hidden desires, any more than the flowers understand that to the insects, whom they consider their slaves, they are life and livelihood. Thus the selfishness of each individual works, in the meadow, for the happiness of all.”
― Ann VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“that what we term sanity is only a measure of success in concealing underlying madness”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Fictions

“promulgation”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“what a bloody silly way to die…”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“This last argument overcame my remorse. It was all I needed, for man is a coward intent on finding an excuse for his cowardice”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“Great are the rewards of an industrious, affluent and quiet life, but even greater is the attraction of the abyss.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“He already knew that life was largely illusion, that though wonderful things could happen, nevertheless as many disappointments came in compensation: and he knew, too, that life could offer a quality even worse – the probability that nothing would happen at all.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“The Houdan hen was never drawn into the cult of Sredni Vashtar. Conradin had long ago settled that she was an Anabaptist”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“Both the Star Wars and Friday the Thirteenth franchises have much to answer for.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“The gun is a magic instrument, converting children to numbers.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“the low sun white and cold, and full of worms. Then a fan of white, gelatinous rays, transparent tubes whose ends mouth the earth. A flat, white opening in the sky, whose light silvered the air, dotted with their shadows. They are the larvae of the sun and will become themselves stars.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“You won’t have nightmares any more when you grow up.’ I solemnly believed this. He looked at me levelly, and said softly, ‘When I grow up, I’m going to kill you.’ His smile slowly came out then, like the sun in a winter cloud. In my memory, the sentence stretches, and seems to be said a hundred times not quite at once. That sentence has its own particular, special moment in time, which lasts until now.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

“There are countless things in this vast universe that humankind does not know. As the Latin poet Horace once noted, the intellect of the mind knows nothing. Instead, people use it to make common sense of the world and have myths that explain things in everyday terms. Still, the secrets of the universe continue to transcend the quotidian. All philosophers must, therefore, doff their hats to the poets when they discover that the path of reason takes them only so far. The universe that lies beyond common sense and logic – the universe that is known intuitively to the poet – belongs to the metaphysical.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Fictions

“surely you’re enough of an armchair philosopher to realize that everything is a reconstruction of something else? Reality is a desperate and evasive creature.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories