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“We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“That's the problem with people who are not human. You can't tell how badly they're hurt, or how much they need your help, and until you ask, they don't always know how to tell you.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we've alive.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“Like most men, Wick could not help terror about one thing erupting as anger about something else.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“We were always finding each other and losing each other and finding each other again, and that was just the way of us.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“Am I a person or a weapon?"
Always he wanted to know that he was a person. He just kept giving me different choices so one time I might slip up and say, "You're not a person."
"You are a person. But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“But minds find ways to protect themselves, build fortifications, and some of those walls become traps.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“It was what my mother said sometimes-to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn't mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us. My mother had found that idea comforting.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“but this was always the test of our relationship. Were we symbiotic or parasitic?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“I would never know anyone like Borne ever again, and even if I saw Borne again it would never be the same as when we lived together in the Balcony Cliffs, the way we’d run down the corridors and punched holes in the walls and joked and laughed and I’d taught him new words that he’d held there in his mind like jewels, and repeated over and over until he knew them better than I did.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“Borne made me happy, but happiness never made anyone less stupid”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“Perhaps only I could truly make Wick a person, by forgiving him, and if I forgave him, if I showed I forgave him, then maybe we could be people together.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“I was alive, and from past experience I knew in time I would forget enough to again pretend that we could someday be free.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“It's not being hurt that hurts,' Borne said.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“Or maybe I was trying to break out of my skin, thinking about how my parents had been actors in roles and the roles were to be my father and mother-and the reason I could see those as roles was that in such extremes, in private, they must have let down their guard and expressed their doubts, their fears, the extent of their despair or hopelessness as our situation worsened and the world revealed the outlines of its true harshness. But because of me, there were whole eternities of hours each day when they had to pretend otherwise, and how I wish I could go back and tell them not to do that. That all I wanted was to see their true selves, remember their true selves.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“You forgive if you can forgive yourself. Or live with what you've done. If you cannot live with what you've done, you cannot live with what others have done either.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“There comes a moment when you witness events so epic you don’t know how to place them in the cosmos or in relation to the normal workings of a day. Worse, when these events recur, at an ever greater magnitude, in a cascade of what you have never seen before and do not know how to classify. Troubling because each time you acclimate, you move on, and, if this continues, there is a mundane grandeur to the scale that renders certain events beyond rebuke or judgment, horror or wonder, or even the grasp of history.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“Early on, I had thought Wick was reaching for a body across the bed. But, for a long time, he had been reaching for me--for the person called Rachel, who did indeed, in the end, love back the person name Wick.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“People with packs are people with purpose.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“A glittering reef of stars, spread out phosphorescent, and each one might have life on it, planets revolving around them. There might even be people like us, looking up at the night sky. It was what my mother said sometimes-to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn't mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us. My mother had found that idea comforting.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we’re alive.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“The stories he told became boring to me through repetition, but I understand now that he was just trying to fix that place with the compass of his memories.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“But all of those points of light above are also suns, even farther away, and they all have worlds, too."
"All of them? Every single one? But that's like hundreds."
"Thousands. Maybe millions."
"But that's incredible," Borne said, quietly. "That's amazing. That's devastating.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“The way back was harder, and no getting around that-no truth I learned struggling back, except that life is struggle. It placed me in some gray realm beyond, a landscape of exertion and anguish. I had nothing left to give, and yet still I had something left it give.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“But what was endurance and shared diminishment if not devotion?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“In the city, the line between nightmare and reality was fluid, just as the context of the words killer and death had shifted over time. Perhaps Mord was responsible. Perhaps we all were.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“Wick never believed he was a person, was continually being undone by that. Borne was always trying to be a person because I wanted him to be one, because he thought that was right. We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“How did I know it had happened? Because of its absence now, because I still felt the loss of it, but I didn’t know how to convey that to Borne then, because he had never lost anything. Not back then. He just kept accumulating, sampling, tasting. He kept gaining parts of the world, while I kept losing them.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“Throughout all of this, my parents did not forget my education. Not a formal education but the education that mattered. What to value. What to hold on to. What to let go of. What to fight for and what to discard. Where the traps were.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne