Shriek Quotes

“{Everyone always tells you that you become more alone as you get older. People write about it in books. They shout it out on street corners. They mumble it in their sleep. But it’s always a shock when it happens to you.}”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword

“you look you see only bitterness or despair. If all of these conditions and situations apply to you, I recommend a refreshing suicide attempt.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword

“is nothing more liberating than playing an illogical game where only you understand all of the rules.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword

“Sabon once said of my brother Duncan Shriek that "He is not a human being at all, but composed entirely of digressions and transgressions.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword

“What strange creatures we are, I thought as I stood there. We live, we love, we die with such random joy and grief, excitement and boredom, each mind as individual as a fingerprint, and just as enigmatic. We make up stories to understand ourselves and tell ourselves that they are true, when in fact they only represent an individual impression of one individual fingerprint, no matter how universal we attempt to make them.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword

“But when you’ve lived in a place this long, no walk can occur solely in the present. Every street, every building, appears to you encrusted with memories, with perspectives that betray your age, your cynicism, your sentimentality, or your lack of feeling where you should feel something.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword

“Writing a book and going underground are so similar. That fear of the unknown never really goes away. But, after a while, it becomes a perverse comfort”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword

“Give back to this earth this good man, O Lord," he said, much to the grumbling dismay of several Manziists present, who missed their traditional rat-festooned funeral ceremony. "Give back to this good man the earth, O Lord," he said again, like a man who, having missed his memorized mark, has to start over in the correct order. "And let you, O Lord, serve as a light to him, for we are imperfect vessels and we platitude simile extended metaphor with barely any pauses followed by more repetition. Period. Comma. Stop. Start. Here I go again about God and the dirt and wait: another platitude, quote from the Truffidian Bible everyone's heard a thousand times before, and even though I once actually knew Bonmot when I was a junior priest, not a single personal anecdote about the man because the scandal of his long-ago departure as Antechamber might somehow still cling to me like a fetid stench. Amen.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword

“Here's a tale for you... Once upon a time, a woman decided to tell a story about how she tried to kill herself. Her brother saved her at the last second—and then sent her north to be dissected by various disciples of empirical religions. Until one day, when her brother's attention wandered, she escaped, and made her way south, back to her mother's home in the fabled city of Ambergris. She felt so hollow inside that she could no longer bear to think of herself as "I.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword

“Tell me you don't love me and I will be glad to escape this fever, this vision," he wrote in his journal, and much else I cannot tell from the torn pages. "I've never been more naked," he tells her, apparently forgetting the night I scraped the fungus from his body, surely his most naked moment.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword

“The sum total of what we know of You is that we do not know You.'"
I leaned closer, across the table. "What if you could know, though? Would that diminish it? If you could see what I have seen. I think it might change your mind." (And, toward the end, didn't he change? And didn't I wish then that I'd never tried to see him uncertain.)”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword

“My initial reaction to meeting him was to want to simultaneously punch him, hug him, shake his hand, and throw him down a dark well. Instead, I generally stayed clear of him and let Janice serve as my intermediary, as she saw mostly his charming side.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword

“Some sentences stretched and contracted our solitude simultaneously, so that at the end of a conversation, we would stand there, staring at each other, unsure of whether we had actually spoken.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword

“into the path of a motored vehicle on the same day Janice seems to have finished her account. Supposedly, a wooden foot was found near the scene, but the body was too badly mangled to be identifiable.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword

“Maybe all of this was prevarication and excuses and not an afterword at all.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword

“If the world is a just place, that mark”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword