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

452. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

455. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

460. “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

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

— 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. “No more avatars.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

466. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

469. “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

470. “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

471. “Adulthood’s full of ghosts.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

472. “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

473. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

475. “Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

476. “He was utterly unnerved by the crowd. They were shaking hands, which even after all of his cultural-sensitivity training seemed like a bizarre thing to do in flu season, and kissing one another on the cheek. These people have no direct experience of pandemics, he reminded himself. None of them were old enough to remember the winter of 1918–1919; Ebola was a few years out and would mostly be confined to the other side of the Atlantic; Covid-19 would not arrive for another thirteen years.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

478. “I remember thine eyes well enough,” Arthur said, distracted by the child version of Cordelia, and this was when it happened. There was a.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

479. “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. There were moments of true joy, actually, in this transient life. He loved sitting here on the beach with Marie. For all they’d lost, he often felt lucky to be here with her, in this life. But they were citizens of a shadow country that in his previous life he’d only dimly perceived, a country located at the edge of an abyss.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

480. “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

481. “It’s so difficult to picture your parents in the time before you existed. In memory, her mother was stranded forever at thirty-six.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

482. “Management consulting. Based out of New York, new client in Los Angeles. I specialize in the repair and maintenance of faulty executives.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

483. “But my point is, doesn’t it seem to you that the people who have the hardest time in this – this current era, whatever you want to call it, the world after the Georgia Flu – doesn’t it seem like the people who struggle the most with it are the people who remember the old world clearly?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

484. “All those people,” Clark said to Imaginary Robert, but Imaginary Robert didn’t reply.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

485. “I’m talking about these people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

486. “Charlie Wu was absolutely not standing in the darkest corner of the room, but there was still no need to look in that direction.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

487. “The streets were haunted with a terrible conspiracy of normalcy...”

— Emily St. John Mandel

488. “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

489. “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

490. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

492. “Theatre in Toronto. Earlier in the evening, three little girls had played a clapping game onstage as the audience entered, childhood versions of Lear’s daughters, and now they’d returned as hallucinations in the mad scene. The king stumbled and reached.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

493. “They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

494. “There was a sound just then, a disturbance passing over the surface of the night as quickly as a stone dropped into water.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

496. “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

497. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

499. “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

500. “He knew that was just the way she handled stress – she evaded, she avoided, she removed herself, but by the end of the week she would come back to him.”

— Emily St. John Mandel