Absolution Quotes

“Could you lose your mind to an unanswerable question, or just your soul?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“What was a person, sometimes, but a wandering fire. But put the flames out, and what was left?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“And what did it really mean if a rabbit was not a rabbit?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“He masticated words like if he didn’t they would come out the other end uncomfortably whole.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“for a songbird was a terrible curse: unpredictable and angry and easy to harm.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“An astronaut who had never left Earth, fighting an enemy toward entropy.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“But about half an hour in, the night began to play their piano music back at them, from across the meadow and the mud flats. “A weird echo,” Team Leader 1 noted. “A strange effect of water and distance.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“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.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“The eye could be distracted by the most dramatic part of the story, when the important moment had already occurred, partially out of sight.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“Some entity that had, through sound, physically altered the life of the mind.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“And, in the end, as in the story, all that might be left besides horror and regret was a streetlight shining on a “quiet and deserted road.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“the null effect—to create a something from the nothing in the darkness, the mind betraying you every time.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“Oh, to be the burning light
sinking beneath the waves.
Oh, to escape this nameless plight
and dive into a whirling grave.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“shouting out the truth of the spirit world, which was that it was just the real world when no one listened to it.”
― Jeff Vandermeer, Absolution

“Because so much ... decayed sprang to life decayed sprang to life. The eye, mislead, did not know what was truly and forever dead. The eye did not know where to focus, could not tell what might next be ressurected.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“The idea of time seemed too ponderous an idea, that it should exist at all,”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“I’m just tired,” he said, because he was tired.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“For, in time, he would shed his self, drift down deep, the bridge a shadow above him, become nestled in the water and the reeds, staring up at a well of distant golden light, soon infiltrated by a green tint.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“What was an expedition but a pain in the ass expressed twenty-four ways. Twenty-two ways.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“Hard to adjust your pace to a ticking clock when you didn’t know the end date.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“also gaining a reputation as being picky and high-strung. He debunked as much as he bunked. He could also become vicious toward people who scoffed at his “powers.” He’d careened from organization to organization in part because he became paranoid and in part because, the subtext indicated, some initial magnetism ceded to dislike, which meant, in the long term, people didn’t trust his ideas. Which only made him more paranoid about authority, which also drove him to become ever more knowledgeable about the occult. Not so much a vicious cycle as somewhat pathetic.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“Disaffected, with a violent streak that could be channeled into a useful aggression.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“the good old days with Jack, when ops had less moral complication, because everything felt so black and white, and every day had been like holding hands running through a field of daisies.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“the expedition had descended into the danger of what he would term “a leaderless state,” or a leadership that catered to the anxieties of those being led.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“But Old Jim knew. He knew the stranger was a Rogue, and he was inclined to consider this Rogue an agent of sorts—a person who, in Central parlance, would come to mean the familiar unfamiliar, “one who knows us but is not us.” A kind of slant rhyme connecting who he was to what espionage was. Such a person moved against the pattern of tides, of stars, of seasons and, in that sense, was not bound by the idea of Time as experienced on the Forgotten Coast. Such a person was dangerous.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“Self-proclaimed Gods are the worst of all, but usually they're easier to kill.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“Oh how miraculous and how deranged, the way the seagulls melted and re-formed, dropped out of the sky and into the sea like eggs cracked open into yolks, splooshing into the water.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“Old Jim did not like the idea of the cameras mingling with the substrata, with the detritus at the bottom of the estuary. To be pulled apart over time, to molecule by molecule become part of the Forgotten Coast. Even if that was the fate of every living thing.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution

“That’s what the Forgotten Coast was for, wasn’t it, Drunk Boat and Man Boy Slim and Charlie said, a bit sentimental. “To lose yourself. To love to live to be whatever you can be.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Absolution