Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)

The answer doesn’t lie in your backyard because no one is going to come and save you even if you beg them to. Especially if you beg them to. You’re on your own, like you’ve always been on your own. You have to keep going forward, until you can’t go forward anymore

Don’t forget about me,” he’d said, so long ago, and you won’t ever forget him, but you might have to leave him behind.

What am I to say? That I do not miss him?

For, having found so many ways to put it off, I believe that my transformation will be more radical than it might have been, that I might indeed become something like the moaning creature. Will I see the real stars then?

If human language meant anything, I might even recount it to the waves or to the sky, but what’s the point

When Grace calls to ask how your day is going, should you say “Same as usual” or “Awful, like conducting autopsies over and over again for no reason”

You’re already caught between wanting me and not being sure I’m all human, is that it? Made by the enemy. Must be the enemy. But can’t help yourself anyway

The unexpected delicacy and delirium of that accidental touch.

So that he was not just a swirl of confused memory, a bruised body, a cipher, but apparently something worth saving, someone in the process of being saved

It had become a stunning day after a cloudy start. The sea had an aquamarine sheen to it, vibrant against the dull shadows of submerged seaweed. At the very edge of a seamless, ever-deepening blue sky, the contrail of an airplane, showing its disdain for denizens of the forgotten coast.