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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

456. “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

457. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

460. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

462. “Eli left her there. In the kitchen he found the pomegranate he’d bought for her and quartered it quickly on a pale blue plate. He thought the contrast between the shades of the pomegranate and the blue might please her. Any one of a number of details can prevent a ship from sinking.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

463. “There is only here, she told herself, there is only this house.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

464. “He isn’t above a little gaslighting, if that’s what it takes to stay out of prison.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

465. “You could call it a performance, or you could call it presenting yourself in the best possible light, no different from putting on a suit and combing your hair.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

466. “He himself found it difficult to live in the present.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

467. “I studied the history of work in university, and if there’s one historical constant over the centuries, it’s that no one especially wants to mess with HR.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

468. “My brother was a decade older than me,” he said. “I loved him, but when you’re a kid, a decade is like the space between galaxies. I never felt I knew him very well.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

469. “Some places have elected mayors or they’re run by elected committees. Sometimes a cult takes over, and those towns are the most dangerous.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

470. “Quietly in the night of an aneurysm when she was seventy-five.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

471. “I still have these moments where I think, Come on, this can’t possibly be it. I cannot possibly be expected to do something this awful day in and day out until the day I die. It’s like a life sentence imposed in the absence of a crime.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

477. “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

478. “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

479. “This one’s my other favorite. ‘He’s successful in interfacing with clients we already have, but as for new clients, it’s low-hanging fruit. He takes a high-altitude view, but he doesn’t drill down to that level of granularity where we might actionize new opportunities.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

480. “Stick to musicians. I think we’re generally saner.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

481. “But what kind of man lies to his daughter about being married? There were aspects of the fairy tale that Vincent was careful not to think about too much at the time, and later her memories of those years had an abstracted quality, as if she’d stepped temporarily outside of herself.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

482. “You know how rare it is to work with someone who loves their life?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

483. “A day later the first stranger walked in. They’d taken to posting guards with whistles, so that they might be warned of a stranger’s approach. They’d all seen the post-apocalyptic movies with the dangerous stragglers fighting it out for the last few scraps. 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

484. “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

485. “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

486. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

488. “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

489. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

491. “No more avatars.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

492. “At the last moment, he added a bouquet of daffodils.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

493. “The century was ending and he had some complaints.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

494. “She put on her headphones and listened to electronica – an epiphany from childhood: when all lies in disarray there’s still order in music.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

495. “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

496. “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

497. “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

498. “Adulthood’s full of ghosts.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

499. “You fall asleep for short periods and then for longer periods and then forever.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

500. “There were several magnificent years of money and travel and then the lights went out.”

— Emily St. John Mandel