Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “But these thoughts broke apart in his head and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air. Finally whispering the same two words over and over: “Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

52. “She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

53. “So this is how it ends, she thought, when the call was over, and she was soothed by the banality of it. You get a phone call in a foreign country, and just like that the man with whom you once thought you’d grow old has departed from this earth.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

54. “It is sometimes necessary to break everything.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

55. “Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

56. “This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

57. “Love is like the lion’s tooth.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

58. “No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

59. “Station Eleven is the size of Earth’s moon and was designed to resemble a planet, but it’s a planet that can chart a course through galaxies and requires no sun. The station’s artificial sky was damaged in the war, however, so on Station Eleven’s surface it is always sunset or twilight or night. There was also damage to a number of vital systems involving Station Eleven’s ocean levels, and the only land remaining is a series of islands that once were mountaintops.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

60. “No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

61. “Cold rain, the sidewalk shining, the shhh of car tires on the wet street. Thinking about the terrible gulf of years between eighteen and fifty.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

62. “Toward the end of his second decade in the airport, Clark was thinking about how lucky he’d been. Not just the mere fact of survival, which was of course remarkable in and of itself, but to have seen one world end and another begin.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

63. “Why, in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? The improbability of it. The sound of the engines faded, the airplane receding into blue until it was folded into silence and became a far-distant dot in the sky.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

64. “Time had been reset by catastrophe.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

65. “If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

66. “High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

67. “If you write literary fiction that’s set partly in the future, you’re apparently a sci-fi writer... I think of it as being more of a story about what remains after we lose everything and the importance of art in our lives.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

68. “This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

69. “The boy turns to his parents and for an instant in the twilight he looks like his namesake, like Jeevan’s brother. He comes to them, the moment already passed, and Jeevan lifts him into his arms to kiss the silk of his hair. Always these memories, barely submerged.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

70. “He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

71. “He wished he could somehow go back and find the iPhone people whom he’d jostled on the sidewalk earlier, apologize to them – I’m sorry, I’ve just realized that I’m as minimally present in this world as you are, I had no right to judge -.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

72. “No one had any idea, it turned out. None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

73. “Because he had been sleepwalking, Clark realized, moving half-asleep through the motions of his life for a while now, years; not specifically unhappy, but when had he last found real joy in his work? When was the last time he’d been truly moved by anything? When had he last felt awe or inspiration? He wished he could somehow go.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

74. “A revelation earned only in hindsight: beauty can have a corrosive effect on character. It is possible to coast for some years on no more than a few polished lines and a dazzling smile, and those years are formative.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

75. “She never feels more alive than at these moments. When onstage she fears nothing.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

76. “They call themselves the light.” “What about it?” “If you are the light,” she said, “then your enemies are darkness, right?” “I suppose.” “If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

77. “Survival might be insufficient, she’d told Dieter in late-night arguments, but on the other hand, so was Shakespeare.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

78. “Dear friends, I find myself immeasurably weary and I have gone to rest in the forest.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

79. “Isn’t indiscretion the very definition of weakness?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

80. “So this is how it ends, she thought, when the call was over, and she was soothed by the banality of it.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

81. “It’s not a hometown, actually, it’s a home island. “It’s the same size and shape as Manhattan,” Arthur tells people at parties all his life, “except with a thousand people.” Delano Island is between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia, a straight shot north from Los Angeles. The island is all temperate rain forest and rocky beaches, deer breaking into vegetable gardens and leaping in front of windshields, moss on low-hanging branches, the sighing of wind in cedar trees.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

82. “Everything ends. I am not afraid.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

83. “The painted forest collapsed into folds and fell soundlessly to the pavement.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

84. “If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

85. “I have walked all my life through this tarnished world. After she walked out of Toronto with her brother, after that first unremembered year, her brother had been plagued by nightmares. “The road,” he’d always said, when she shook him awake and asked what he’d been dreaming of. He’d said, “I hope you never remember it.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

86. “Days slipped past and the news went on and on until it began to seem abstract, a horror movie that wouldn’t end.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

87. “The revelation of privacy: she can walk down the street and absolutely no one knows who she is. It’s possible that no one who didn’t grow up in a small place can understand how beautiful this is, how the anonymity of city life feels like freedom.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

88. “She is beautiful in a way that makes people forget what they were going to say when they look at her.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

89. “She works on her never-ending project for hours at a time. In art school they talked about day jobs in tones of horror. She never would have imagined that her day job would be the calmest and least cluttered part of her life.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

90. “No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

91. “The stillness of the water, the horizon framed by other glass towers and miniature boats drifting in the distance.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

92. “I’ve heard of a dozen prophets over the years. It’s not an uncommon occupation.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

93. “Give me quiet, he thought, give me forests and ocean and no roads. Give me the walk to the village through the woods in summer, give me the sound of wind in cedar branches, give me mist rising over the water, give me the view of green branches from my bathtub in the mornings. Give me a place with no people in it, because I will never fully trust another person again.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

94. “He stared at his crown and ran through a secret list of everything that was good.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

95. “Some places, you pass through once and never return, because you can tell something’s very wrong. Everyone’s afraid, or it seems like some people have enough to eat and other people are starving, or you see pregnant eleven-year-olds and you know the place is either lawless or in the grip of something, a cult of some kind.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

96. “One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

97. “It’s an awful thing to be the target.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

98. “A man was curled on his side near the elevators, shivering. She wanted to speak to him, but speaking would take too much strength, so she looked at him instead – I see you, I see you – and hoped this was enough.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

99. “She was thinking about the container-ship fleet on the horizon. The crew out there wouldn’t have been exposed to the flu. Too late to get to a ship herself now, but she smiled at the thought that there were people in this reeling world who were safe.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

100. “Memories are always bent retrospectively to fit individual narratives.”

— Emily St. John Mandel