Dead Astronauts Quotes

“But, in the end, joy cannot fend off evil.
Joy can only remind you why you fight.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“Do you understand? Nothing thrives without being broken. Nothing exists without being dead first.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“And a soul is just a delusion that lives in the body. No delusion survives death. Death is more honest than that.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“What is too much to bear? Not being alive is too much to bear.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“What am I? How am I connected? What is my purpose? What is all of this, felt in the flesh? Why is it so beautiful? What is beautiful? Why do I not know? What else don't I know? When will I know it? Will I ever know? Would knowing be too much?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“They killed us with traps. They killed us with poisons. They killed us with snares. They killed us with guns. They killed us with knives. They strangled us. They trampled us. They tore us apart with hounds. They baited steel-jawed traps. They starved us out. They burned us alive. They withheld water. They killed all our prey. They slit our throats. They filled in our burrows. They drowned us. They trampled us under horses’ hooves. They bred us for fur and bludgeoned us to death. They kept us in cages so small with so many we burst apart. They suffocated us with poison gas. They strangled us. They put us in sacks and beat us with clubs. They cut out our tongues so we bled to death. They skinned us alive. They detonated rock and stopped our hearts all unknowing. They swung us by our tails and smashed our skulls against stones. They murdered us in each and every year. They murdered us on each and every day.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“A creator who no longer remembered the creation: Wasn’t that one definition of a god?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“If I went rummaging through your carcass, would I find you?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“Dead astronauts were no different than living astronauts. Neither could shed their skin. Neither could ever become part of what they journeyed through. Suits were premade coffins. Space was the grave. Better to think of yourself as dead already. There was freedom in that; liberated the mind to roam quadrants farther than the body.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“There was no moment like any other moment and yet each moment was the same.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“That tablecloth created by forced labor looks amazing on that table manufactured with formaldehyde in a sweatshop.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“You wouldn’t understand me even if I made sense.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“Be still that human need. To fill the silence with words.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“Because dead things felt only love for the universe.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“As the storm washed over them and they huddled there not knowing their futures until it had passed and all was still.
None of them ready.
Thought they were in the middle.
Not the end.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“In the end, if you change the enemy enough, if you wear them down, perhaps losing is good enough.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“The banal drawling frowning speech of men who don’t care about what they’re doing. Until forced to. Who all unawares destroy their own warrens, who poison their own food, convinced of righteousness.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“But there would come a terrible and obliterating day when beauty was the only thing that mattered, and it mattered little if the pure part of beauty was blood. And on that day, the globes embedded in the walls hurt to look upon because the price paid for the wonders displayed within was too high. It had become a death cult, under a veneer of what was inevitable and necessary, and anything else was illogical.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“Also, Moss liked to rescue whatever animal or plant needed it. She believed they had earned it.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“But why should they have a leader? Why should they not roam like wild things? For they were wild things. Why should they have a purpose? For they were wild things.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“Did you ever need to live on as I needed you to live on? Did you ever had a need so great that the vestiges of your mission existed even if you weren't sure you did? Did you ever believe you were a ghost? Did you ever reach a point when you weren't sure purpose existed anymore? And yet, still. you were here.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“Perhaps because trees did not resist. Trees fell over on their own accord, sometimes, as if to prove their love for the ax. The chainsaw that felled most of them just completed a trees own inevitable thought.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“That love must be unbending. Love must be cruel. Love must not yield. Otherwise, love meant nothing, could do nothing.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“Do you have the new phone yet that someone made continents away because they were forced to and then someone else starved to death because when they mined the components they destroyed all the crop lands and the forest?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“Most had bellies full of plastic. The plastic would grow and grow in their bellies until, years from now, as they mingled, as they drank expensive wine, their bellies would burst and out would come all the plastic, dribbling onto the floor. Pressing cool and bloody against some synthetic floor.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“I dearly wished the joy of triangulation, the pounce based on a good ear’s geometry.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“This plastic disk.” “And you throw it.” “Why?” “For fun.” “Team sport.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“The body did not exist separate from the soul because the soul didn’t exist.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“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. The girl had learned that it hardly mattered in the end,”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

“What was a person but someone who turned monstrous, anyway? What was a person, in Moss's experience, but a kind of demon.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts