Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “There was the flu that exploded like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth and the shock of the collapse that followed, the first unspeakable years when everyone was traveling, before everyone caught on that there was no place they could walk to where life continued as it had before and settled wherever they could, clustered close together for safety in truck stops and former restaurants and old motels.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

102. “There was a reminder that the library was always seeking books, and that they paid in wine.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

103. “At moments when other people could only stare, he wanted to be the one to step forward.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

104. “He wanted nothing that he didn’t already have.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

105. “What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

106. “She knows there are traps everywhere that can make her cry, she knows the way she dies a little every time someone asks her for change and she doesn’t give it to them means that she’s too soft for this world or perhaps just for this city, she feels so small here.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

107. “I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

108. “I’m like a man in a wheelchair watching other people run. I can see what good acting is but I can’t quite reach it but I’m so close sometimes, V. I’m really trying.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

109. “Late in the day, she found a folded piece of paper in her pocket. She recognized August’s handwriting. A fragment for my friend – If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you Silent, my starship suspended in night She’d never seen his poetry before and was impossibly moved by it. “Thank you,” she said when she saw him next. He nodded.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

110. “It’s possible to both know and not know something.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

111. “I believe when you’re speaking English, you’re allowed to refer to it as Prague.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

112. “A or B, two options present themselves, and you choose the one that seems best at the time.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

113. “It isn’t possible,” she said. “But there it is. Look again.” In the distance, pinpricks of light arranged into a grid. There, plainly visible on the side of a hill some miles distant: a town, or a village, whose streets were lit up with electricity.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

114. “Simone had been in New York City for six months by now, and she thought that she was beginning to understand how a person could become very tired here. She’d seen them on the subway, the tired people, the people who’d worked too long and too hard, caught up in the machine, eyes closed on the evening trains.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

115. “If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain? Perhaps vessels are setting out even now, traveling toward or away from him, steered by sailors armed with maps and knowledge of the stars, driven by need or perhaps simply by curiosity: whatever became of the countries on the other side?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

116. “Stop looking for me. I’m not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don’t want to go home.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

117. “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.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

118. “A tired king at the end of his reign, perhaps not as sharp as he had been, contemplating a disastrous division of his kingdom.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

119. “And here, all momentum left him. He could go no farther. The theater tickets had been intended as a romantic gesture, a let’s-do-something-romantic-because-all-we-do-is-fight, and she’d abandoned him there, she’d left him onstage performing CPR on a dead actor and gone home, and now she wanted him to buy milk. Now that he’d stopped walking, Jeevan was cold. His toes were numb. All the magic of the storm had left him, and the happiness he’d felt a moment earlier was fading.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

120. “Tesch seems to be someone who mistakes rudeness for intellectual rigor.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

121. “The claustrophobia of the forest. The first few trees visible before her, monochrome contrasts of black shadow and white moonlight, and beyond that an entire continent, wilderness uninterrupted from ocean to ocean with so few people left between the shores.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

122. “Imagining an alternate reality where there was no Iraq War, for example, or where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn’t been swiftly contained; an alternate world where the Georgia flu blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

123. “He has no interest in comics. He doesn’t understand the difference between serious graphic novels and Saturday-morning cartoons with wide-eyed tweetybirds and floppy-limbed cats.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

124. “He was half-naked in the bed, lying like a starfish. After she got up he always liked to see how much of the bed he could sleep on at once.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

125. “Do you remember when you were young and gorgeous? Clark wanted to ask. Do you remember when everything seemed limitless?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

126. “Dieter walked a little ahead of the other actors, murmuring to his favourite horse. The horse, Bernstein, was missing half his tail, because the first cello had just restrung his bow last week.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

127. “A suggestion of a trapdoor waiting under every word.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

128. “The ship was flagged to Panama, which meant that legally it was a floating piece of Panamanian territory, but of course Panama had neither the incentive nor the manpower to investigate a disappearance off the west coast of Africa. It is possible to disappear in the space between countries.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

129. “Those previous versions of herself were so distant now that remembering them was almost like remembering other people, acquaintances, young women whom she’d known a long time ago, and she felt such compassion for them. “I regret nothing,” she told her reflection in the ladies’ room mirror, and believed it.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

130. “He was the second violin and a secret poet, which is to say that no one in the Symphony knew he wrote poetry except Kirsten and the seventh guitar.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

131. “I don’t believe in the perfectibility of the individual. What was it in this statement that made Clark want to weep?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

132. “She liked to make a game of leaving the house without turning on any lights. There’s an inherent pleasure in being unseen.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

133. “The seventh guitar was a nervous person, because he was nearly blind. He’d been able to see reasonably well with an extremely thick pair of glasses, but he’d lost these six years ago and since then he’d lived in a confusing landscape distilled to pure color according to season – summer mostly green, winter mostly gray and white – in which blurred figures swam into view and then receded before he could figure out who they were.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

134. “It is possible to leave so much out of any given story.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

135. “She started to explain her project to him again but the words stopped in her throat. ‘You don’t have to understand it,’ she said. ‘It’s mine.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

136. “That’s the thing I like about birthdays, they stay in one place.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

137. “Beneath the fury was something literally unspeakable, the television news carrying an implication that no one could yet bring themselves to consider. It was possible to comprehend the scope of the outbreak, but it wasn’t possible to comprehend what it meant.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

138. “She loved details, and the world, and inevitably became lost in both. Violently beautiful sunsets could reduce her to tears. She was virtually incapacitated by fireflies.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

139. “I have walked all my life through this tarnished world.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

140. “But the trouble, is she doesn’t really care. There was a time when this conversation would have reduced her to tears, but now she swivels in her chair to look out at the lake and thinks about moving trucks. She could call in sick to work, pack up her things, and be gone in a few hours. It is sometimes necessary to break everything.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

141. “The disorientation of meeting one’s sagging contemporaries, memories of a younger face crashing into the reality of jowls, under-eye pouches, unexpected lines, and then the terrible realization that one probably looks just as old as they do.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

142. “She liked books, but the hours spent in small-town libraries were tedious, and she began the first list when she was eight or nine as a means of distraction. A list of names, eventually expanding to ten or twelve pages: Lilia, Gabriel, Anna, Michelle. In every town her name was different.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

143. “Her breath was shallow in her chest and the tears were silent and constant.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

144. “What she aspired to was a kind of delirious perfection. What Lilia wanted was to travel, but not only that; she wanted to be a citizen of everywhere, free-wheeling and capable of instant flight.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

145. “If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

146. “Do you find yourself sort of secretly hoping that civilization collapses, Melissa said, just so that something will happen?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

147. “If another memo could possibly be sent out, this one specific to smokers: You cannot be both an unwashed bohemian and Cary Grant.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

148. “What does it mean to be a ghost, let alone to be there, or here? There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life –.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

149. “You told me you’re trying to shed your possessions or something, right?” “Exactly. They’re lovely, but I don’t want more things.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

150. “I’m no expert, but I remember reading somewhere, every time you retrieve a memory, that act of retrieval, it corrupts the memory a little bit. Maybe changes it a little.”

— Emily St. John Mandel