Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “It is possible to leave so much out of any given story.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “Do you remember when we were young and gorgeous? Clark wanted to ask. Do you remember when everything seemed limitless? Do you remember when it seemed impossible that you’d get famous and I’d get a PhD? But instead of saying any of this he wished his friend a happy birthday.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

158. “I’ve always had a weakness for places where it seems like time slows down.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “Always these memories, barely submerged.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

179. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

181. “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

182. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Gil said, breaking an impasse. “I believe the evening calls for fairies.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

183. “William the Conqueror was a thousand years ago, Bert. Surely we might strive to be somewhat more civilized than the maniacal grandson of a Viking raider.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

184. “He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

193. “These people living out their lives in underwater fallout shelters, clinging to the hope that the world they remembered could be restored. The Undersea was limbo.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

194. “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

195. “He’d known for a long time by then that the world’s changes wouldn’t be reversed, but still, the realization cast his memories in a sharper light. The last time I ate an ice-cream cone in a park in the sunlight. The last time I danced in a club. The last time I saw a moving bus. The last time I boarded an airplane that hadn’t been repurposed as living quarters, an airplane that actually took off. The last time I ate an orange.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

197. “The flu,” the prophet said, “the great cleansing that we suffered twenty years ago, that flu was our flood.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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