Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Survival is insufficient.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

2. “I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

3. “The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

4. “There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

5. “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

6. “This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air. Finally whispering the same two words over and over: “Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

7. “Being alive is a risk.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “But does a person have to be either admirable or awful? Does life have to be so binary? Two things can be true at the same time, he told himself.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

12. “It is sometimes necessary to break everything.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

13. “You can’t argue with them, because they live by an entirely different logic.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

14. “Do you remember when we were young and gorgeous?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

15. “Nothing is over yet, she told herself. The cat’s still inside.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

16. “Adulthood’s full of ghosts... High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

17. “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

18. “Did this happen to all actors, this blurring of borders between performance and life?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

19. “To be loved is a calamity. Love will try to see the words before it’s finished. “What is your job?” love will ask it. And you will ask, “What is my job?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

20. “But doesn’t everything seem obvious in retrospect?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

21. “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

22. “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

23. “A life, remembered, is a series of photographs and disconnected short films.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

24. “If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you Silent, my starship suspended in night.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

25. “The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour, And for me, now as then, it is too much. There is too much world. – Czeslaw Milosz The Separate Notebooks.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

26. “There’s an inherent pleasure in being unseen.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

27. “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

28. “They are always waiting, the people of the Undersea. They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

29. “I remember damage. Then escape. Then adrift in a stranger’s galaxy for a long, long time. But I’m safe now.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

30. “Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

31. “What’s the point of doing all that work,” Tesch asks, “if no one sees it?” “It makes me happy. It’s peaceful, spending hours working on it. It doesn’t really matter to me if anyone else sees it.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

32. “We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

33. “It was gorgeous and claustrophobic. I loved it and I always wanted to escape.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

34. “Well, it’s nice that at least the celebrity gossip survived.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

35. “She had once met an old man up near Kincardine who’d sworn that the murdered follow their killers to the grave, and she was thinking of this as they walked, the idea of dragging souls across the landscape like cans on a string.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

36. “The thing with the new world,” the tuba had said once, “is it’s just horrifically short on elegance.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

37. “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? Perhaps soon humanity would simply flicker out, but Kirsten found this thought more peaceful than sad. So many species had appeared and later vanished from this earth; what was one more? How many people were even left now?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

38. “There are certain qualities of light that blur the years.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

39. “I want to find you. I want to disappear with you. I want to find you, and in the finding to make you disappear into me. I want to be your language. I want to be your translator. I want to be your dictionary. I want to be your map. I wish, I wish, I wish I knew where you are tonight.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

40. “Yes, it was beautiful. It was the most beautiful place I have ever seen. It was gorgeous and claustrophobic. I loved it and I always wanted to escape.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

41. “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

42. “The first sentence of the assassin’s note rang true: we were not meant for this world. I returned to my city, to my shattered life and damaged home, to my loneliness, and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

43. “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

44. “Miranda returns her attention to the house. The sensation of being in a dream that will end at any moment, only she isn’t sure if she’s fighting to wake up or to stay asleep.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

45. “They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

46. “Miranda opened her eyes in time to see the sunrise. A wash of violent color, pink and streaks of brilliant orange, the container ships on the horizon suspended between the blaze of the sky and the water aflame, the seascape bleeding into confused visions of Station Eleven, its extravagant sunsets the its indigo sea. The lights of the fleet fading into morning, the ocean burning into sky.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

47. “So this is how it ends, she thought, when the call was over, and she was soothed by the banality of it. You get a phone call in a foreign country, and just like that the man with whom you once thought you’d grow old has departed from this earth.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

48. “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

49. “What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

50. “Station Eleven is the size of Earth’s moon and was designed to resemble a planet, but it’s a planet that can chart a course through galaxies and requires no sun. The station’s artificial sky was damaged in the war, however, so on Station Eleven’s surface it is always sunset or twilight or night. There was also damage to a number of vital systems involving Station Eleven’s ocean levels, and the only land remaining is a series of islands that once were mountaintops.”

— Emily St. John Mandel