Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Clark disliked the general state of unshavenness, partly for aesthetic reasons and partly because he was a believer in the broken-windows theory of urban-crime management, the way the appearance of dereliction can pave the way for more serious crimes.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

452. “Because we are always looking for the former world, before all the traces of the former world are gone.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

453. “There had been countries, and borders. It was hard to explain. In.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

454. “Vincent realized that she felt perfectly at ease, for the first time in recent memory. The truth was that in the kingdom of money, before she’d met Mirella she’d been extremely alone.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

455. “None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in, so much so that she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her, other Vincents engaged in different events.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

456. “Vincent was lovely but not, Olivia had decided, a serious person. Since her late teens she had been mentally dividing people into categories: either you’re a serious person, she’d long ago decided, or you’re not. A difficulty of her current life was that she was no longer sure which category she fell into.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

457. “Some people have families from the beginning,” he says. “Other people have to look a little harder.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

458. “Edwin’s gaze drifted away from the man’s face, to the mild decrepitude of the September garden. The salvias were bare now, for the most part, brown stalks and dried leaves, a few last blooms wisping blue and violet in the failing light. He was struck by an understanding of what his life could be from this moment: he could live here quietly, and care for the garden, and that might eventually be enough.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

459. “I was grateful that my dog had slept through my younger self’s incompetence.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

460. “Sayid carried himself with a regality that Kirsten had fallen in love with once.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

461. “What inspired Edwin to speak just then? He found himself dwelling on the matter years later, at war, in the terminal horror and boredom of the trenches. Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

462. “Erin Arvedlund’s Too Good to Be True and Diana B. Henriques’s The Wizard of Lies.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

463. “You look like an executive,” she said to herself in the mirror, and the thought that flitted behind this was You look like a stranger. She pushed it away.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

464. “Painting was something that had grabbed hold of her for a while, decades, but now it had let go and she had no further interest in it, or it had no further interest in her. All things end, she’d told herself, there was always going to be a last painting, but if she wasn’t a painter, what was she? It was a troubling question.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

465. “What a pleasant state of affairs, he’d been thinking lately, to be with a woman who didn’t hold a grudge.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

466. “There’s such happiness in a successful escape.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

467. “Why are the righteous so often irritating? “She couldn’t be happier,” Joelle said. “She loves that she was right.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

468. “There was not, in fact, an email gun. Although that would’ve been nice. I would’ve preferred that.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

469. “There are tens of thousands of ships at sea at any given moment and he liked to imagine each one as a point of light, converging into rivers of electric brilliance over the night oceans, flowing through the narrow channels of the Suez and Panama Canals, the Strait of Gibraltar, around the edges of continents and out into the oceans, an unceasing movement that drove countries, a secret world that he loved so much.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

470. “So in order for your scheme to succeed for as long as it did, a great many people had to believe in a story that didn’t actually make sense. But everyone was making money, so no one cared, except Ella Kaspersky.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

471. “Adulthood’s full of ghosts.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

472. “It was difficult to be alive in the world.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

473. “Well, people were throwing change at me, so I did at one point decide to just turn my hat upside down in front of me, so that all the change would at least land in one place.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

474. “If her parents loved her,” Meiying said, “it would have felt like the end of the world.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

475. “I was pleased as I said this, because I’d never really thought of myself in this way before, but it seemed to me that I’d been paying close attention my entire life. I hadn’t been successful at very many things, but I’d always been good at watching.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

476. “It’s just one future slipping away and being replaced by another.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

477. “She stopped for a decaf latte at a Starbucks and was struck by the barista’s brilliant green hair. “Your hair’s beautiful,” she said, and the barista smiled.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

478. “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

479. “He carried himself with the tedious confidence of all people with money, that breezy assumption that no serious harm could come to him.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

480. “Leon hadn’t understood, and he’d given Alkaitis his retirement savings anyway. He didn’t insist on a detailed explanation. One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

481. “Every life contains a measure of terrifying moments.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

482. “I mean, here’s the question,” Joelle said, “and I’d be genuinely interested to hear your thoughts: How did he know we’d do it? Would anyone do something like this, given enough money, or is there something special about us? Did he look at me one day and just think, That woman seems conveniently lacking in a moral center, that person seems well suited to participate in a –.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

483. “Maybe not everyone needs to have a specific ambition. I could be the sort of person who just goes to beautiful places and owns beautiful things. Maybe I could film five-minute videos of every sea and every ocean and perhaps there would be some meaning in that.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

484. “In that first year after our mother died, my thoughts often veered toward disaster.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

485. “When he tells people in Toronto that he’s from British Columbia, they’ll invariably say something about how they like Vancouver, as though that glass city four hours and two ferries to the southeast of his childhood home has anything to do with the island where he grew up.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

486. “So we don’t own the building,” the director said, “but we hold a ten-thousand-year lease on the space.” “You’re right. That’s magnificent.” “Nineteenth-century hubris. Imagine thinking civilization would still exist in ten thousand years. But there’s more.” She leaned forward, paused for effect. “The lease is renewable.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

487. “Vincent was asleep beside him, breathing quietly, and her hair was like a pool of ink in the room’s dim light.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

488. “The forest had crept up to the edges of the school parking lot and sent an advance party out toward the building, small trees growing through cracks in the pavement. There were a few cars parked on flat tires. “Let’s watch for a moment,” August said, and they stood for a while at the edge of the woods.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

489. “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

490. “Do you want to grab a quick drink or something?” he asked Simone. “No,” Simone said. “Are you sure?” “You’re pretty much the last person I’d want to get a drink with.” “Okay, got it. You could just say no.” “I did.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

491. “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

492. “Still, just to go there and see it.” An unspoken understanding: neither of them would leave this continent again.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

493. “Our guests in Caiette want to come to the wilderness, but they don’t want to be in the wilderness. They just want to look at it, ideally through the window of a luxury hotel. They want to be wilderness-adjacent. The point here” – he touched the white star with one finger, and Walter admired his manicure – “is extraordinary luxury in an unexpected setting. There’s an element of surrealism to it, frankly. It’s a five-star experience in a place where your cell phone doesn’t work.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

494. “I switch on the camera as I hear the thunder, and I record the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, lightning flashing over the roiling ocean. In a storm, the waves are like mountains. Cold rain in my face and I know it’s on the lens but this, too, will be beautiful, the blurring and the raindrops.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

495. “Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

496. “She didn’t know who was paying for the drink, but she knew it wasn’t her.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

497. “No more avatars.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

498. “The night extended before me, all those magnificently empty hours shining with possibility.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

499. “The scale of the catastrophe was objectively enormous – We owned a home, and then we lost it – but there was such relief in no longer having to think about the house, the vertiginous mortgage payments and constant upkeep.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

500. “If nothing else, it’s pleasant to consider the possibility.”

— Emily St. John Mandel