Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

452. “It wasn’t only exhaustion, Jeevan realized. Hua was afraid.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

453. “One of them shrugged and pulled the blanket down to fit an oxygen mask over Arthur’s face. Jeevan realized this charade must be for Arthur’s family, so they wouldn’t be notified of his death via the evening news. He was moved by the decency of it.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

454. “You don’t have to be a terrible person to intentionally try to change the time line. You just have to have a moment of weakness. Really just a moment. When I say weakness, I might mean something more like humanity.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

455. “I should have done more for her, Clark thought. I should have pulled her back from the edge. But it had taken everything he had to stay back from the edge himself, and what could he have done?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

456. “You’re showing your hand. You can’t let people see how hard you’re trying.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

457. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

460. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

463. “What if one were to dissolve into the wilderness like salt into water.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

464. “That’s one thing I like about birthdays, they stay in one place. Same spot on the calendar, year in, year out.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

465. “You know what I’ve learned about money? I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that’s when I realized that money is its own country.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

466. “She tried to keep this opinion to herself and occasionally succeeded.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

467. “We are living in a simulation, I told myself, as the trolley stopped a block from my apartment, but this fell so far short of, well, of the reality, for lack of a better word. I couldn’t convince myself. I didn’t believe it. 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

468. “I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

469. “He has a sense of waiting for something. But what?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

470. “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

471. “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

472. “I respected that, actually. She was doing a strange thing and she felt she didn’t owe me any explanation.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

473. “Twenty years after the collapse, she loved the music of the Symphony, loved being a part of it, but found the Symphony’s insistence on performing Shakespeare insufferable. She tried to keep this opinion to herself and occasionally succeeded.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

474. “If there was ever a time when she had some control over her working life, she’d decided, she wouldn’t work under fluorescent lights. Was there some way she could work outside? She didn’t see how – she had an indoor skill set – but the thought was appealing.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

475. “She observed the way the life of the city continued around her, indifferent and uninterrupted.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

480. “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

481. “It’s so difficult to picture your parents in the time before you existed. In.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

482. “In a version of her life so distant that it now seemed like a fairytale.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

483. “Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

484. “She had real potential. Real potential. But an inability to recognize opportunity? That right there is a fatal flaw.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

485. “I like waitresses with tattoos. It implies the existene of a secret life.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

486. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

488. “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

489. “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

490. “You know the phrase I keep thinking about?” a poet asked, on a different panel, at a festival in Copenhagen. “The chickens are coming home to roost.′ Because it’s never good chickens. It’s never ‘You’ve been a good person and now your chickens are coming home to roost.’ It’s never good chickens. It’s always bad chickens.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

491. “She liked electronica, mostly ’80s stuff that didn’t move him, New Order singing about a thousand islands in the sea.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

492. “I believe the evening calls for fairies.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

493. “The sofa was much dirtier in real life than in the paintings.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

494. “Here in the warmth and dim lighting, with scents of coffee and cheesecake in the air, Nina Simone on the sound system, the gripped feeling in her chest was beginning to subside.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

495. “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

496. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

498. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

500. “Sasha found herself at a loss for words. What am I asking you? I’m asking you if I was complicit in something unspeakable, because Anna, Anna, I already carry so much.”

— Emily St. John Mandel