Claire

“Hadn’t the hummingbird been a kind of miracle? Hadn’t it diminished us not to see this as a miracle and protect it?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Hummingbird Salamander

“We have built so many toxic constructs, we cannot see through the latticework. We have built so many mirrors, there are no windows to shatter.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Hummingbird Salamander

“May we imagine for them a vector, passing through the invisible, the "imaginary," the unimaginable, carrying them safely into this postwar Paris where the taxis, battered veterans of the mythic Marne, now carry only lovers and cheerful drunks, and music which cannot be marched to goes on uninterrupted all night, in the bars and bals musettes for the dancers who will always be there, and the nights will be dark enough for whatever visions must transpire across them, no longer to be broken into by light displaced from Hell, and the difficulties they find are no more productive of evil than the opening and closing of too many doors, or of too few. A vector through the night into a morning of hosed pavements, birds heard everywhere but unseen, bakery smells, filtered green light, a courtyard still in shade...”
― Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

“Sometimes I feel as if we live in hell and don’t even realize it. The lacerations are endless. The lies we accept, the rituals we perform. All these useless acts.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Hummingbird Salamander