Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)

Once, from this vantage, he’d seen something vast rippling through the water beyond the sandbars, a kind of shadow, the grayness so dark and deep it had formed a thick, smooth shape against the blue. Even with his binoculars he could not tell what creature it was, or what it might become if he stared at it long enough. Didn’t know if eventually it had scattered into a thousand shapes, revealed as a school of fish, or if the color of the water, the sharpness of the light, changed and made it disappear, revealed as an illusion. In that tension between what he could and couldn’t know about even the mundane world, he felt at home in a way he would not have five years ago. He needed no greater mysteries now than those moments when the world seemed as miraculous as in his old sermons. And it was a good story for down at the village bar, the kind of story they expected from the lighthouse keeper, if anyone expected anything from him at all.

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