Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Paul had the impression he often had in the United Kingdom, of having just been subtly insulted in an obscure way that would take too much energy to parse, and as always he couldn’t tell if the insult was real or just a typically Canadian case of postcolonial insecurity.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

203. “That kind of insanity’s contagious,” Dolores had said, echoing his thoughts.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

204. “Leon would not have predicted that he and his wife would turn out to be the kind of people who’d abandon a house. He would’ve imagined that such an act would bury a person under fathoms of shame, but here on the expressway in the early morning light, abandoning the house felt unexpectedly like triumph.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

205. “There’s something almost tedious about disaster,” Miranda said. “Don’t you find? I mean, at first it’s all dramatic, ‘Oh my god, the economy collapsing, there was a run on my bank so my bank ceased to exist over the weekend and got swallowed up by JPMorgan Chase,’ but then that keeps happening, it just keeps collapsing, week after week, and at a certain point...”

— Emily St. John Mandel

206. “A life lived in a simulation is still a life.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

207. “She was unsettling. But sometimes there was something perfect about it.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

208. “I’ve always loved rain, and knowing that it isn’t coming from clouds doesn’t make me love it less.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

209. “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

210. “Clark had thought he was meeting his oldest friend for dinner, but Arthur wasn’t having dinner with a friend, Clark realized, so much as having dinner with an audience. He felt sick with disgust. When he left a short time later he found himself wandering, even though by now he’d oriented himself and knew how to get back to the Tube station. 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

211. “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.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

212. “It’s cold in Toronto but I like where I’m living.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

213. “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

214. “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

215. “I don’t think a camera will bring my mother back. “What I’m suggesting,” Caroline said softly, “is that the lens can function as a shield between you and the world, when the world’s just a little too much to bear. If you can’t stand to look at the world directly, maybe it’s possible to look at it through the viewfinder.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

216. “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

217. “That’s the trouble with land. It’s got too many people on it.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

218. “He woke to quiet voices. This had been happening more and more lately, this nodding off unexpectedly, and it left him with an unsettled intimation of rehearsal. You fall asleep for short periods and then for longer periods and then forever.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

219. “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

220. “Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

221. “Outside the world was ending and snow continued to fall.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

223. “Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia. He likes sitting by his window.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

224. “You’re a master of deflection,” Jessica murmured, without looking at her. “You’re like some kind of deflection ninja.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

225. “Dr. Eleven: What was it like for you, at the end? Captain Lonagan: It was exactly like waking up from a dream.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

226. “Sartre: Hell is other people” in pen inside one of the caravans, and someone else had scratched out “other people” and substituted “flutes.” People.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

227. “For as long as I could remember I just wanted to get out, and then I got to Toronto and no one knew me. Toronto felt like freedom.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

228. “Getting lost is death, he can see that. No, this whole place is death. No, that’s unfair – this place isn’t death, this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn’t care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn’t even noticed him. He feels somewhat deranged.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

229. “When the Antonine Plague raged through the Roman Empire,” Olive told the audience, “the army was decimated.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

230. “I haven’t thought of an airplane in so long.” “That’s because you’re so young.” A slight edge to his voice. “You don’t remember anything.” “I do remember things. Of course I do. I was eight.” Dieter had been twenty years old when the world ended.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

231. “We knew it was coming and we were breezy about it.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

232. “No star burns forever.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

233. “They’d performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

234. “No one seems to have noticed that Miranda’s saying very little. “I wish you’d try a little harder,” Arthur has said to her once or twice, but she knows she’ll never belong here no matter how hard she tries. These are not her people. She is marooned on a strange planet. The best she can do is pretend to be unflappable when she isn’t.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

235. “Everything offended Jessica, which is inevitable when you move through the world in search of offense.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

236. “He closed the fridge door, made his last breakfast – scrambled eggs – and showered, dressed, combed his hair, left for the theater an hour early so he’d have time to linger with the newspaper over his second-to-last coffee at his favorite coffee place, all of the small details that comprise a morning, a life.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

237. “August said that given an infinite number of parallel universes, there had to be one where there had been no pandemic and he’d grown up to be a physicist as planned, or one where there had been a pandemic but the virus had had a subtly different genetic structure, some minuscule variance that rendered it survivable, in any case a universe in which civilization hadn’t been so brutally interrupted.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

238. “What a terrible time that was,” Clark said softly to an imaginary Robert, practicing for the future. “Awful,” Imaginary Robert agreed. “Remember those days when you were in the airport, and I didn’t know where you were?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

239. “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

240. “She has felt for months that she’s nearing the end of something, even though the story has spun off in a dozen directions and feels most days like a mess of hanging threads.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

241. “I had already moved too fast, too far, and wished to travel no further. I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush. Notes and Acknowledgments The quote referenced on this page, “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,” is from John Buchan’s 1919 novel Mr.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

242. “I don’t know, it just started to seem a little claustrophobic, living in the same place with the same people I’d known since I was born.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

243. “Thinking about the terrible gulf of years between eighteen and fifty.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

244. “My secret is, I hate people, the woman said, very sincerely, and for the first time Mirella liked her. All people? All except maybe like three, she said.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

245. “In Yupik, a language spoken by the Inuit along the Bering Sea, there is Ellam Yua: a kind of spiritual debt to the natural world, or a way of moving through that world with some measure of generosity, of grace, or a way of living that acknowledges the soul of another human being, or the soul of a rock or of a piece of driftwood; sometimes translated as soul, or as God, but meaning neither.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

246. “Did I say I liked working with her? I loved working with her. I considered her a friend. You know how rare it is to work with someone who loves their life?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

248. “You should have told me my cat was a time traveler.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

249. “She had studied the habits of the monied with diligence. She copied their modes of dress and speech, and cultivated an air of carelessness. But she was ill at ease around the household staff and the caterers, because she feared that if anyone from her home planet were to look at her too closely, they’d see through her disguise.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

250. “When I wasn’t playing my violin in the airship terminal I liked to walk my dog in the streets between the towers. In those streets everyone moved faster than me, but what they didn’t know was that I had already moved too fast, too far, and wished to travel no further. 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