Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)

This feature functions as a sort of mirror to the lighthouse, and our narrator persists in calling it a tower, although its top is at ground level and the stairs lead downward. The rest of the expedition refers to it as a tunnel, and this difference in perception sets the narrator at odds with her fellow travelers in ways that will only deepen.

The scene obliquely embodied the scrap of writing I had encountered on the Tower wall:… the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives

The actual nature of the border had been withheld from us for security reasons; we knew only that it was invisible to the naked eye.

kind of panic for a moment, in which the walls suddenly had a fleshy aspect to them, as if we traveled inside of the gullet of a beast.

As I left the landing, I had the peculiar thought that I was not the first to pocket the photo, that someone would always come behind to replace it, to circle the lighthouse keeper again.

I was convinced that when I wasn’t looking at them, these cells became something else, that the very act of observation changed everything. I knew this was madness and yet still I thought

I saw a tower, plunging into the ground. The thought that we stood at its summit made me a little dizzy.

These expeditions that come here at a hidden entry point along a mysterious border, an entry point that (perhaps) is mirrored within the deepest depths of the Tower. Imagine these expeditions, and then recognize that they all still exist in Area X in some form, even the ones that came back, especially the ones that came back: layered over one anoth

“I think we don’t know what we need,” the psychologist said. “But we definitely did not need the anthropologist here if she was unable to do her job.”