Top 100 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes
#2. The stillness of the water, the horizon framed by other glass towers and miniature boats drifting in the distance.
Emily St. John Mandel
#3. All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze.
Emily St. John Mandel
#4. Because we are always looking for the former world, before all the traces of the former world are gone.
Emily St. John Mandel
#5. He woke to quiet voices. This had been happening more and more lately, this nodding off unexpectedly, and it left him with an unsettled intimation of rehearsal. You fall asleep for short periods and then for longer periods and then forever.
Emily St. John Mandel
#8. We have been lost for so long,' " she said, still quoting from that scene. She looked past him at the boy. The boy was staring at the gun in his hands. He was nodding, seemingly to himself. " 'We long only for the world we were born into.'
Emily St. John Mandel
#9. He wished he could somehow go back and find the iPhone people whom he'd jostled on the sidewalk earlier, apologize to them - I'm sorry, I've just realized that I'm as minimally present in this world as you are, I had no right to judge -
Emily St. John Mandel
#10. No, it's just, if everything happens for a reason," Elizabeth persists, "as personally, I believe that it does, then when I hear a story of how two people came together, it's like a piece of the plan is being revealed.
Emily St. John Mandel
#11. It isn't possible," she said. "But there it is. Look again." In the distance, pinpricks of light arranged into a grid. There, plainly visible on the side of a hill some miles distant: a town, or a village, whose streets were lit up with electricity.
Emily St. John Mandel
#12. Survival might be insufficient, she'd told Dieter in late-night arguments, but on the other hand, so was Shakespeare.
Emily St. John Mandel
#14. then came a virus like an avenging angel, unsurvivable, a microbe that reduced the population of the fallen world by, what? There were no more statisticians by then, my angels, but shall we say ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent?
Emily St. John Mandel
#15. I believe when you're speaking English, you're allowed to refer to it as Prague.
Emily St. John Mandel
#16. She knows there are traps everywhere that can make her cry, she knows the way she dies a little every time someone asks her for change and she doesn't give it to them means that she's too soft for this world or perhaps just for this city, she feels so small here.
Emily St. John Mandel
#18. What she aspired to was a kind of delirious perfection. What Lilia wanted was to travel, but not only that; she wanted to be a citizen of everywhere, free-wheeling and capable of instant flight.
Emily St. John Mandel
#19. The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?
Emily St. John Mandel
#20. but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.
Emily St. John Mandel
#21. What a wonderful thing, to get paid for doing what you love," she says, and he agrees with this.
Emily St. John Mandel
#22. Dear V.,
I'm a terrible actor and this city is fucking freezing and I miss you.
- A.
Emily St. John Mandel
#23. Miranda," he said. "How long has it been?" This seemed to her a silly question. She'd assumed, she realized, that everyone remembers the date of their divorce, the same way everyone remembers their wedding date. "Eleven years," she said.
Emily St. John Mandel
#24. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place,
Emily St. John Mandel
#25. He was half-naked in the bed, lying like a starfish. After she got up he always liked to see how much of the bed he could sleep on at once.
Emily St. John Mandel
#26. She liked books, but the hours spent in small-town libraries were tedious, and she began the first list when she was eight or nine as a means of distraction. A list of names, eventually expanding to ten or twelve pages: Lilia, Gabriel, Anna, Michelle. In every town her name was different.
Emily St. John Mandel
#27. It was beginning to dawn on her that she had traveled so long, so perfectly, that it was difficult to conceive of another kind of life. It was difficult to imagine stopping, but stopping as imminent.
Emily St. John Mandel
#28. LATER THEY HAVE a house in the Hollywood Hills and a Pomeranian who shines like a little ghost when Miranda calls for her at night, a white smudge in the darkness at the end of the yard. There
Emily St. John Mandel
#29. Cold rain, the sidewalk shining, the shhh of car tires on the wet street. Thinking about the terrible gulf of years between eighteen and fifty.
Emily St. John Mandel
#30. She is beautiful in a way that makes people forget what they were going to say when they look at her.
Emily St. John Mandel
#31. The corridor was silent. It was necessary to walk very slowly, her hand on the wall. A man was curled on his side near the elevators, shivering. She wanted to speak to him, but speaking would take too much strength, so she looked at him instead - I see you, I see you - and hoped this was enough.
Emily St. John Mandel
#32. They acted because they loved acting, but also, let's be honest here, to be noticed. All they wanted was to be seen.
Emily St. John Mandel
#33. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one's hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.
Emily St. John Mandel
#36. They are always waiting, the people of the Undersea. They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin. Miranda
Emily St. John Mandel
#38. Or maybe just an amphetamine freak? Clark's thoughts wandered to a particularly exciting week in Toronto, eighteen or nineteen years old, when he and Arthur had accepted some pills from a new friend at a dance club and stayed up for seventy-two hours straight.
Emily St. John Mandel
#41. Why, in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? The improbability of it. The sound of the engines faded, the airplane receding into blue until it was folded into silence and became a far-distant dot in the sky.
Emily St. John Mandel
#42. She was thinking about the way she'd always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.
Emily St. John Mandel
#43. If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there's nothing that you cannot justify. There's nothing you can't survive, because there's nothing that you will not do.
Emily St. John Mandel
#44. There were a number of impractical shoes, stilettos mostly, beautiful and strange.
Emily St. John Mandel
#45. Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.
Emily St. John Mandel
#47. I'm like a man in a wheelchair watching other people run. I can see what good acting is but I can't quite reach it but I'm so close sometimes, V. I'm really trying.
Emily St. John Mandel
#48. This was during the final month of the era when it was possible to press a series of buttons on a telephone and speak with someone on the far side of the earth.
Emily St. John Mandel
#49. They'd performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings.
Emily St. John Mandel
#51. There are thoughts of freedom and imminent escape. I could throw away almost everything, she thinks, and begin all over again. Station Eleven will be my constant.
Emily St. John Mandel
#52. I don't believe in the perfectibility of the individual. What was it in this statement that made Clark want to weep?
Emily St. John Mandel
#53. The thing with the new world," the tuba had said once, "is it's just horrifically short on elegance.
Emily St. John Mandel
#54. But these thoughts broke apart in his head and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air.
Emily St. John Mandel
#57. Stop looking for me. I'm not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don't want to go home.
Emily St. John Mandel
#58. had been installed on top of each cab for the drivers. The cabs were stripped of everything that added excess weight but left otherwise intact, with doors that closed and windows of difficult-to-break automobile glass,
Emily St. John Mandel
#59. I've heard of a dozen prophets over the years. It's not an uncommon occupation.
Emily St. John Mandel
#60. The house is silent now and she feels like a stranger here. "This life was never ours," she whispers to the dog, who has been following her from room to room, and Luli wags her tail and stares at Miranda with wet brown eyes. "We were only ever borrowing it.
Emily St. John Mandel
#61. Are you asking if I believe in ghosts?"
"I don't know. Maybe. Yes."
"Of course not. Imagine how many there'd be."
"Yes," Kirsten said, "that's exactly it.
Emily St. John Mandel
#62. No one ever thinks they're awful, even people who really actually are. It's some sort of survival mechanism.
Emily St. John Mandel
#63. So we ask them who they are, and their leader smiles at me and says, 'We are the light.'
Emily St. John Mandel
#64. Jeevan's understanding of disaster preparedness was based entirely on action movies, but on the other hand, he'd seen a lot of action movies. He
Emily St. John Mandel
#65. Dr. Eleven: What was it like for you, at the end?
Captain Lonagan: It was exactly like waking up from a dream.
Emily St. John Mandel
#66. She wants to believe they're lying in moonlight, but she knows the light through the window is probably mostly electric.
Emily St. John Mandel
#68. The boy turns to his parents and for an instant in the twilight he looks like his namesake, like Jeevan's brother. He comes to them, the moment already passed, and Jeevan lifts him into his arms to kiss the silk of his hair. Always these memories, barely submerged.
Emily St. John Mandel
#69. First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that's not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.
Emily St. John Mandel
#70. Of course," the cabbie said, "you don't know where you're going unless you know where you're going.
Emily St. John Mandel
#74. Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldn't remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had been cut from an automobile tire, three knives in her belt.
Emily St. John Mandel
#75. I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.
Emily St. John Mandel
#77. No one had any idea, it turned out. None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended.
Emily St. John Mandel
#80. He has no interest in comics. He doesn't understand the difference between serious graphic novels and Saturday-morning cartoons with wide-eyed tweetybirds and floppy-limbed cats.
Emily St. John Mandel
#81. Not quite a room, Jeevan thought now, looking around the stage. It was too transitory, all those doorways and dark spaces between wings, the missing ceiling. It was more like a terminal, he thought, a train station or an airport, everyone passing quickly through.
Emily St. John Mandel
#82. Not merely pretty, he decides. She is actually beautiful, but it's a subtle kind of beauty that takes some time to make itself apparent.
Emily St. John Mandel
#83. She was thinking about the container-ship fleet on the horizon. The crew out there wouldn't have been exposed to the flu. Too late to get to a ship herself now, but she smiled at the thought that there were people in this reeling world who were safe.
Emily St. John Mandel
#84. Jeevan was crushed by a sudden certainty that this was it, that this illness that Hua was describing was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life. p20
Emily St. John Mandel
#87. She had been overtipping for as long as she'd had money. These small compensations for how fortunate she'd been.
Emily St. John Mandel
#89. All of this,' the prophet said, serene, 'all of our activities, Sayid, you must understand this, all of your suffering, it's all part of a greater plan.'
'You'd be surprised at how little comfort I take from that notion.
Emily St. John Mandel
#91. We long only to go home,' " Kirsten said. This was from the first issue, Station Eleven. A face-off between Dr. Eleven and an adversary from the Undersea. " 'We dream of sunlight, we dream of walking on earth.'
Emily St. John Mandel
#92. it is possible to survive this but not unaltered, and you will carry these men with you through all the nights of your life.
Emily St. John Mandel
#93. but mostly his work just made him dislike houses. These enormous anchors that people tied to their lives.
Emily St. John Mandel
#94. She was astonished to see that the boy with the handgun was crying, his face wet. If she could only speak to August. We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid.
Emily St. John Mandel
#96. He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.
Emily St. John Mandel
#97. She loved details, and the world, and inevitably became lost in both. Violently beautiful sunsets could reduce her to tears. She was virtually incapacitated by fireflies.
Emily St. John Mandel
#98. Clark liked to think he knew London but the truth was he'd spent most of his adult life in New York, secure within the confines of Manhattan's idiot-proof grid, and on this particular evening London's tangle of streets was inscrutable.
Emily St. John Mandel
#99. TWENTY YEARS AFTER the end of air travel, the caravans of the Traveling Symphony moved slowly under a white-hot sky.
Emily St. John Mandel
#100. She had never entirely let go of the notion that if she reached far enough with her thoughts she might find someone waiting, that if two people were to cast their thoughts outward at the same moment they might somehow meet in the middle.
Emily St. John Mandel
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