Authority Quotes
"In Control’s dreams it is early morning, the sky deep blue with just a twinge of light."
"Sometimes this happens while he is awake, as if he hasn’t been paying enough attention, and then he silently recites his own name until the real world returns to him."
"Where were they found?" he asked her now, when what he wanted to ask was why they hadn’t been kept separate from one another."
"Read the files," she said, making it clear he should have read them already.
"His first full day was only four hours old and he already felt contaminated by the dingy, bizarre building."
"He liked to burrow in, try to find a level where the details illuminated without overwhelming him."
"Just like the members of the prior expedition, none of them had any recollection of how they had made their way back."
"Why isn’t everyone more excited to have the expedition back?"
"Don’t think of them by their names, he’d told himself on the plane. Let them carry only the weight of their functions at first."
"His mother had told him so before he’d come here."
"Control’s mother often seemed to him like a flash of light across a distant night sky."
"The biologist claimed to remember as little as the others."
"He hadn’t been told he would spend his first day questioning disoriented returnees from Area X."
"She stood her ground. 'No one’s sure. Never prejudge the evidence.'"
"Why are you still keeping paper files, Grace?" he asked, taking a step forward.
"I don’t need the other files because I only need to question one of them."
"Everything in what he saw showed that she had cared, and yet that she had cared not at all about the functioning of the agency."
"The biologist’s hair had been long and dark brown, almost black, before they’d shaved it off."
"Feeling is the important part. You lose the need or impetus to divulge, to communicate, a bit like astronauts lose muscle mass."
"No surprises. No satisfaction for the keepers of strange secrets. No strangeness before its time."
"The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear."
"There came a distant shout across the river, and an even-more distant reply."
"It’s a chance to do better. It’s a chance to erase the past."
"The night the border had come down, it had taken ships and planes and trucks with it, anything that happened to be on or approaching that imaginary but too-real line at the moment of its creation."
"It’s more like creating a story or a narrative to guide them through the narrows. An anchor."
"It might not be fair, John, I know that. But this might be your last chance."
"But now he almost wished she was writing to him about the Southern Reach in a letter, not telling him about it in person."
"It means the specific characteristics of a place—the geography, geology, and climate that, in concert with the vine’s own genetic propensities, can create a startling, deep, original vintage."
"No two areas are the same. That no two wines can be exactly the same because no combination of elements can be exactly the same."
"I feel there is an overemphasis on the discrete elements that could be said to jut out of the landscape—while the landscape itself is largely ignored."
"You could map the entirety of a process—or, say, a beachhead or an invasion—only after it had happened, and still not know the who or the why."
"Grand unified theories could backfire—for example, Central’s overemphasis on trying to force connections between unconnected right-wing militia groups."
"It was like being in one of those aquariums with the water overhead, but murkier, so that I could not really tell what was swimming there."
"It is twenty feet high and twelve feet wide."
"I woke in the empty lot and I thought I was dead. I thought I was in purgatory, maybe, even though I don’t believe in an afterlife."
"I’ve told you that nothing happened there. I woke up as if from an endless dream."
"Institutions, even individual departments in governments, were the concrete embodiments of not just ideas or opinions but also of attitudes and emotions."
"Perhaps you’re not very serious today; couldn’t that be it?"
"I’ve already changed the pass-key combination on my door. Anything you need to know, you can just ask me."
"The director’s vast array of textures revealed 'only' that she had been absorbed in her task, as if she had been desperate to write down her observations in the moment."
"He knew it was too late, his only solace that surely if he started walking toward it, Whitby or Cheney would stop him. Or the lasers would."
"The border had come down in the early morning, on a day, a date, that no one outside of the Southern Reach remembered or commemorated."
"The swirling light defeated his attempts to conjure up the biologist."
"I’ll try not to stare at it directly for too long. It tends to draw you in."
"What do you want from me? What do you really want?"
"I won’t assist in charting my own pathology."
"I made a terrible mistake. I think about it every day. It guides me in my job now. It makes me humble and keeps me focused."
"It’s enough that the operative has come back."
"They just sprayed insecticide here. I can smell it."
"Go ahead and check the seats for change, John."
"So use whatever you don’t care about as a bargaining chip."
"Anything the director did, she did because she believed it was important."
"The first expedition: a sacrifice to a lack of context. A lament unrecognized as such until it was too late."
"She became obsessed with metrics, with changing the context."
"The director can be very harsh, but never harsher than with herself."
"Ask your mother. Your mother had a hand in both things, I believe."
"Then let’s go out to the courtyard and have a smoke."
"A normal person might give up. That would be very normal."
"Ctrl was beginning to seem the only control he actually had."
"But there were no doors where there had always been doors before. Only wall. And the wall was soft and breathing under the touch of his hand."