Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I’ve always had a weakness for places where it seems like time slows down.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

152. “This was something he adored about her, the way she let things go so easily. 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

153. “I have found you nine times before, maybe 10, and I’ll find you again.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

154. “He only listened to Bach when he was desperate for order.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

155. “She watched his gaze flicker over her suit, her gleaming shoes, and realized he was performing the same reconciliations she was, adjusting a mental image of a long-ago spouse to match the changed person sitting before him.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

156. “We stand it because we were younger than you were when everything ended, Kirsten thought, but not young enough to remember nothing at all. Because there isn’t much time left, because all the roofs are collapsing now and soon none of the old buildings will be safe. Because we are always looking for the former world, before all the traces of the former world are gone. But it seemed like too much to explain all this, so she shrugged instead of answering him.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

157. “Michaela wasn’t someone Lilia ever trusted, but there was a certain kinship; she shared Lilia’s suspicion that the world might prove, in the end, to have been either a mirage or a particularly elaborate hoax.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

158. “There were a number of impractical shoes, stilettos mostly, beautiful and strange.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

159. “But what made It bearable were the friendships, of course, the camaraderie and the music and the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy when it didn’t matter who’d used the last of the rosin on their bow or who anyone had slept with, although someone – probably Sayid – had written “Sartre: Hell is other people” in pen inside one of the caravans, and someone else had scratched out “other people’ and substituted “flutes”.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

160. “He’d expected that at the very least he’d be able to slip into a decent social scene, but the problem with dropping out of the world is that that world moves on without you, and between the time spent on an all-consuming substance and the time spent working soul-crushing retail jobs while he tried not to think about the substance and the time spent in hospitals and rehab facilities, Paul was twenty-three years old and looked older.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

161. “I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

162. “The Georgia Flu was so efficient that there was almost no one left.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

163. “If it was hard to break into new places then, in that ludicrously easy world where food was on shelves in supermarkets and travel was as easy as taking a seat in a gasoline-powered machine and water came out of taps, it was several orders of magnitude more difficult now. The Symphony was insufferable, hell was other flutes or other people or whoever had used the last of the rosin or whoever missed the most rehearsals, but the truth was that the Symphony was their only home.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

164. “Always these memories, barely submerged.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

165. “As Jeevan walked on alone he felt himself disappearing into the landscape. He was a small, insignificant thing, drifting down the shore. He had never felt so alive or so sad.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

166. “The corridor was silent. It was necessary to walk very slowly, her hand on the wall. 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. The lobby was empty now. The staff had fled.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

167. “Maybe this could be enough. 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.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

168. “Lately time had been stuttering a little.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

170. “You were his second-in-command, Dr. Eleven. In his absence, you must lead.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

171. “She moved over the surface of life the way figure skaters move, fast and choreographed, but she never broke through the ice, she never pierced the surface and descended into those awful beautiful waters, she was never submerged and she never learned to swim in those currents, these currents: all the shadows and light and splendorous horrors that make up the riptides of life on earth.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

172. “It turns out getting straight A’s isn’t the same thing as being motivated enough to drag yourself to school in the mornings.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

173. “She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn’t entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

174. “They acted because they loved acting, but also, let’s be honest here, to be noticed. All they wanted was to be seen.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

175. “What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

176. “She likes Hollywood best at night, in the quiet, when it’s all dark leaves and shadows and night-blooming flowers, the edges softened, gently lit streets curving up into the hills.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

177. “He never had time to read on the outside, but here he joins a book club where they discuss The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is The Night with a fervent young professor who seems unaware that anyone other than F. Scott Fitzgerald has ever written a book.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

178. “Also because the two young women working the kiosk seemed profoundly unconcerned by what was unfolding on CNN, either that or they were extremely stoic or they hadn’t noticed yet, so visiting them was like going back in time to the paradise of a half hour earlier, when he hadn’t yet known that everything was coming undone.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

179. “On two separate occasions he’s told people in Los Angeles that he’s from Canada and they’ve asked about igloos. An allegedly well-educated New Yorker once listened carefully to his explanation of where he’s from – southwestern British Columbia, an island between Vancouver Island and the mainland – and then asked, apparently in all seriousness, if this means he grew up near Maine.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

180. “You’ve actually just reminded me. I brought you something.” She had finally assembled the first two issues of the Dr. Eleven comics, and had had a few copies printed at her own expense. She extracted two copies each of Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven and Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 2: The Pursuit from her handbag, and passed them across the table.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

181. “The girl looked like a china doll, she thought. She looked like someone who’d been well-cared-for and coddled all her life. She was probably someone who would grow up to be like Miranda’s assistant Laetitia, like Leon’s assistant Thea, unadventurous and well-groomed.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

182. “Do you have to actually be in love for a relationship to be real, whatever real means, so long as there’s respect and something like friendship?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

183. “Anyway hallucinations is the wrong word, it’s more like a creeping sense of unreality, a sense of collapsing borders, reality seeping into the counterlife and the counterlife seeping into memory.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

184. “It occurred to her that this was what being caught might be like. The white-hot flash of recognition and then her life blown open, a radioactive mirror in a wasteland, her secretive life torn asunder and scattered outward in disarray.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

185. “There’d been an epidemic, the man had told him. Thirty people had died incandescent with fever, including the mayor. After this, a change in management, but the tuba’s acquaintance had declined to elaborate on what he meant by this. He did say that twenty families had left since then, including Charlie and the sixth guitar and their baby. He said no one knew where they’d gone, and he’d told the tuba it was best not to ask.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

186. “It is possible to disappear in the space between countries.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

187. “A memory, but it’s a memory so vivid that there’s a feeling of time travel, of visiting the actual moment.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

188. “First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered. 35 DIALLO: What was it like, those last days before you left Toronto?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

189. “Miranda is a person with very few certainties, but one of them is that only the dishonourable leave when things get difficult.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

190. “If the dreams of the last speaker of Chamicuro won’t survive the passage into another language, then what else has been lost? What else that was expressible in that language cannot be said in another?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

191. “You write a book with a fictional tattoo and then the tattoo becomes real in the world and after that almost anything seems possible. She’d seen five of those tattoos, but that didn’t make it less extraordinary, seeing the way fiction can bleed into the world and leave a mark on someone’s skin.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

192. “You stare at the road and the road stares back.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

193. “If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it? Perhaps soon humanity would simply flicker out, but Kirsten found this thought more peaceful than sad.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

194. “Montreal was less than two inches to the north.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

195. “Miranda,” he said. “How long has it been?” This seemed to her a silly question. She’d assumed, she realized, that everyone remembers the date of their divorce, the same way everyone remembers their wedding date. “Eleven years,” she said.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

196. “Thinking of a boy standing on the tarmac by the ghost plane, Air Gradia Flight 452, Arthur Leander’s beloved only son, reading verses about plagues aloud to the dead.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

197. “People left the Symphony sometimes, but the ones who stayed understood something that was rarely spoken aloud. Civilization in Year Twenty was an archipelago of small towns. These towns had fought off ferals, buried their neighbors, lived and died and suffered together in the blood-drenched years just after the collapse, survived against unspeakable odds and then only by holding together into the calm, and these places didn’t go out of their way to welcome outsiders.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

198. “He just desires no further movement, for the time being. If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

199. “Ah,” Tesch says. “Very admirable of you. You know, it reminds me of a documentary I saw last month, a little Czech film about an outsider artist who refused to show her work during her lifetime. She lived in Praha, and – ” “Oh,” Clark says, “I believe when you’re speaking English, you’re allowed to refer to it as Prague.” Tesch appears to have lost the power of speech.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

200. “Forever is the most dizzying word in the English language. The idea of staying in one place forever was like standing at the border of a foreign country, peering over the fence and trying to imagine what life might be like on the other side, and life on the other side was frankly unimaginable.”

— Emily St. John Mandel