Acceptance Quotes

“You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“Bodies could be beacons, too, Saul knew. A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way, still shone across the miles as a warning, an invitation, or even just a static signal. People opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes, so you couldn’t see it, because they had no other choice.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“Natural places are no different than human cities. The old exists next to the new. Invasive species integrate with or push out native species. The landscape you see around you is the same as seeing an old cathedral next to a skyscraper.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“Sometimes, too, other people gave you their light, and could seem to flicker, to be hardly visible at all, if no one took care of them. Because they’d given you too much and had nothing left for themselves.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“She knew where it would all lead, what it always led to in human beings--a decision about what to do. What are we going to do? Where do we go from here? How do we move forward? What is our mission now? As if purpose could solve everything, could take the outlines of what was missing and by sheer will invoke it, make it appear, bring it back to life.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“If you don't know your passion, it confuses your mind, not your heart.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“Honesty was often just a way of being cruel.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don’t know if I accept everything even now. I don’t know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there’s defiance in that, too.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“Would that not be the final humbling of the human condition? That the trees and birds, the fox and the rabbit, the wolf and the deer... reach a point at which they do not even notice us, as we are transformed.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“Some things you can be so close to that you never grasp their true nature.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“Writing, for me, is like trying to restart an engine that has rested for years, silent and rusting, in an empty lot--choked with water and dirt, infiltrated by ants and spides and cockroaches. Vines and weeds shoved into it and sprouting of it. A kind of coughing splutter, an eruption of leaves and dust, a voice that sounds a little like mine but is not the same as it was before.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“We must trust our thoughts while we sleep. We must trust our hunches. We must begin to examine all of those things that we think of as irrational simply because we do not understand them. In other words, we must distrust the rational, the logical, the sane, in an attempt to reach for something higher, for something more worthy.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“That’s when you rise, finally. You rise out of the mud, in the rain, and you go back inside and suddenly everything gets really cold and calm. The answer doesn’t lie in your backyard because no one is going to come and save you even if you beg them to. Especially if you beg them to. You’re on your own, like you’ve always been on your own. You have to keep going forward, until you can’t go forward anymore.
You have to hang on. You’re almost there. You can make it to the end.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“People who asked questions didn't necessary like being asked questions.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“Some things came to you late, but late was better than never.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“The only solution to the environment is neglect, which requires our collapse.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“A whale can injure another whale with its sonar. A whale can speak to another whale across sixty miles of ocean. A whale is as intelligent as we are, just in a way we can’t quite measure or understand. Because we’re these incredibly blunt instruments.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“There's nothing to this world,' he said, 'but what our senses tell us about it, and all I can do is the best I can on that information.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“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. *”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“What if an infection was a message, a brightness a kind of symphony? As a defense? An odd form of communication? If so, the message had not been received, would probably never be received, the message buried in the transformation itself. Having to reach for such banal answers because of a lack of imagination, because human beings couldn’t even put themselves in the mind of a cormorant or an owl or a whale or a bumblebee.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“You're on your own, like you've always been on your own. You have to keep going forward, until you can't go forward anymore.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“Never has a setting been so able to live without the souls traversing it.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“I’m not an answer,” she said. “I’m a question.” She might also be a message incarnate, a signal in the flesh, even if she hadn’t yet figured out what story she was supposed to tell.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“What are we going to do? Where do we go from here? How do we move forward? What is our mission now? As if purpose could solve everything, could take the outlines of what was missing and by sheer will invoke it, make it appear, bring it back to life.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“And I am trying my best, too. Even if we don’t always know what that means or how it will play out. You can get caught up in something that’s beyond you, and never understand why.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“Among all the impossible things he had already witnessed, what were a few more?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“What does the border look like?” A child’s question. A question whose answer means nothing. There is nothing but border. There is no border.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“And God said, Let there be light. God said that, Saul, and He has come from so far away, and His home is gone, but His purpose remains. Would you deny Him His new kingdom?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance