Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Is this your first time staying with us?” a woman at a reception desk for the third or fourth hotel said to her, and Olive wasn’t sure how to answer, because if you’ve stayed in one Marriott, haven’t you stayed in all of them?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

461. “She’d never fainted before but surely this was what it felt like, this terrible lightheadedness, the awareness of being just at the edge of an abyss.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

462. “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

463. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

466. “No more avatars.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

468. “When you met your husband, what was your first clue that you loved him?” “Well,” Olive said, “I guess just a sense of recognition, if that makes sense. I remember the first time I saw him, I looked at him and I knew he’d be important in my life. Is that a clue, though?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

469. “The best Shakespearean actress in the territory, and her favorite line of text is from Star Trek.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

470. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

472. “There was a moment of doubt on the way to the cash registers, straining against the weight of the cart – was he overreacting? – but he was committed, he’d decided, too late to turn back.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

473. “The next cart was all toilet paper.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

474. “It was impossible not to think in that moment of the master bedroom suite in Jonathan’s house in Greenwich, the wasteful acres of carpeting and empty space. Luxury is a weakness.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

475. “No one does. You go to the store, you buy a banana, you don’t think about the men who piloted the banana through the Panama Canal. Why would you?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

476. “You’re overdressed for the occasion,” Olivia said, but it came out softer than she intended, not at all sharp. Perhaps she could be a gentler person, she thought. Her shell was so hard in those days. “Can you take off your shirt?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

477. “The truth is,” Olive said, behind a lectern in Paris, “even now, all these centuries later, for all our technological advances, all our scientific knowledge of illness, we still don’t always know why one person gets sick and another doesn’t, or why one patient survives and another dies. Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

478. “Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

479. “I think you’d want to visit all those points in time,” Zoey said. “You’d want to speak with the letter writer in 1912, the video artist in 2019 or 2020, and the novelist in 2203.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

480. “She put on her headphones so she could pretend not to hear if anyone spoke to her and willed herself toward invisibility.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

481. “The thing with being away from her husband and daughter was that every hotel room was emptier than the one before.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

482. “A secretary is a keeper of secrets.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

483. “There was a scheduled rainfall in – I glanced at my watch – two minutes. I stepped out of the trolley and walked very slowly, on purpose. I’ve always loved, rain, and knowing that it isn’t coming from clouds doesn’t make me love it less.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

484. “She hopes she isn’t as awkward to other people as she feels to herself.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

485. “His only part in the story: to observe and remember the chain of events. Not all of us will be cast in the greatest dramas. Someone has to remember them.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

486. “The one thing in my life I have hated the most out of a long list of things, is being told what to do. I can tolerate it in a kitchen but not in the bedroom, and I tell him that.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

487. “I’m saying his only contact with the other patients was speaking with one of them about where to board the hotel shuttle.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

488. “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

489. “Are we being hunted?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

490. “It’s like the moment just before sleep, when you’re not quite unconscious – you’re awake enough to realize that you’re falling asleep – but your thoughts and your memories begin unspooling into narrative and you realize you have already started to dream: one last moment of waking, choking on saltwater...”

— Emily St. John Mandel

491. “Renata’s eyes, which were worried and doelike when Renata looked at her head-on but coolly confident when she was looking away. The effect was of two different people. Which to show?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

492. “Vincent swam every night to strengthen her will because she was desperately afraid of drowning.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

493. “If it had been anyone other than Hua, Jeevan wouldn’t have believed it, but he had never known a man with a greater gift for understatement. If Hua said there was an epidemic, then epidemic wasn’t a strong enough word.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

494. “It’s possible to both know and not know something,” he said later under cross-examination, and the state tore him to pieces over this. But he spoke for several of us actually, several of us who’d been thinking a great deal about that doubleness, that knowing and not knowing, being honorable and not being honorable, knowing you’re not a good person but trying to be a good person regardless around the margins of the bad.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

495. “In the shadow country it was necessary to lie down every night with a fear so powerful that it felt to Leon like a physical presence, some malevolent beast that absorbs the light. He lay beside Marie and remembered that in this life there was no space for any kind of error or misfortune. What would happen to her if something happened to him?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

496. “He placed a package of frozen corn in his basket. What if this was the last time he ever performed this action, here in this particular store? It was an appealing thought.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

497. “Forgive me,” Olive said, “I fear there’s a problem with my translator bot. I thought you said he was kind to care for his own child.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

498. “Although actually when she thought about it, Annette said, the post-apocalyptic movies she’d seen had all involved zombies. “I’m just saying,” she said, “it could be much worse.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

499. “We’ve admitted over two hundred flu patients since this morning,” Hua said. “A hundred and sixty in the past three hours. Fifteen of them have died. The ER’s full of new cases. We’ve got beds parked in hallways. Health Canada’s about to make an announcement.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

500. “The one thing in my life I have hated the most, out of a long list of things, is being told what to do. I.”

— Emily St. John Mandel