Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “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

202. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

204. “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

205. “It must’ve been so beautiful” is the inevitable reply. “It was,” he tells them, “it is,” and then finds a way to change the subject because it’s difficult to explain this next part. Yes, it was beautiful. It was the most beautiful place I have ever seen. It was gorgeous and claustrophobic. I loved it and I always wanted to escape.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

209. “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

210. “Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “He planned to go west immediately, but it’s so easy to linger in Halifax, where he falls prey to a personal weakness he’s been aware of all his life: Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia. He likes sitting by his window. There’s a constant movement of people and ships. He doesn’t want to leave, so he stays.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

218. “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

219. “No star burns forever.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

220. “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

221. “We went to a place once where the children didn’t know the world had ever been different, although you’d think all the rusted-out automobiles and telephones wires would give them a clue. Some towns are easier to visit than others.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

222. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

230. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

233. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

235. “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

236. “The chickens are coming home to roost.’ Because it’s never good chickens. It’s never ‘You’ve been a good person and now your chickens are coming home to roost.’ It’s never good chickens. It’s always bad chickens.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

237. “Plague closed the theaters again and again, death flickering over the landscape. And now in a twilight once more lit by candles, the age of electricity having come and gone, Titania turns to face her fairy king. “Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, pale in her anger, washes all the air, that rheumatic diseases do abound.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

239. “No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

240. “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

241. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

243. “They wanted to expand the territory, so that spring they followed the Maumee River down past the ruins of Toledo, and then the Auglaize River into Ohio, and they eventually walked into the town where I lived.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

245. “Maybe you’re right. Turns out reality is more important than we thought,” Dion said.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

250. “I was in the hotel,” he said finally. “I followed your footprints in the snow.” There were tears on his face. “Okay,” someone said, “but why are you crying?” “I’d thought I was the only one,” he said.”

— Emily St. John Mandel