Jeff Vandermeer Quotes

Every edit is a lie.

That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude.

The map is not the territory... The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map.

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

The shadows of things are greater than themselves; and the more exaggerated the shadow, the more unlike the substance.

If you want to convey fact, this can only ever be done through a form of distortion. You must distort to transform what is called appearance into image.

My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.

The first lesson a watcher learns is to separate truth from illusion. Because in the world of magics, it's the hardest thing to do.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.

When you meet somebody for the first time, you're not meeting them. You're meeting their representative.

The best way to weaken one's enemy was to get him to believe that you were on his side.

Faith, indeed, has up to the present not been able to move real mountains, although I do not know who assumed that it could. But it can put mountains where there are none.

How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles, and people with a reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

Kittredge had obviously misjudged her, but he had learned that was the way with most people. The story was never the story, and it surprised you, how much another person could carry.

We always have a tendency to see those things that do not exist and to be blind to the great lessons that are right there before our eyes.

Memory creates a hallucination of the past, desire creates a hallucination of the future.

By the way, nothing I ever say, ever, has any truth behind it.

Truth is more deceptive than falsehood, for it is more frequently presented by those from whom we do not expect it, and so has against it a numerical presumption.

My friend, the truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it's absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so.

A woman, like a cross-eyed man, looks one way, but goes another--hence her mysteriousness.

The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside.