Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

218. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

220. “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

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. “No star burns forever.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “Shakespeare was the third born to his parents, but the first to survive infancy. Four of his siblings died young. His son, Hamnet, died at eleven and left behind a twin. Plague closed the theaters again and again, death flickering over the landscape.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

237. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

239. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

241. “In the dream I was so happy,” he whispered. “I looked up and there it was, the plane had finally come. There was still a civilization somewhere. I fell to my knees. I started weeping and laughing, and then I woke up.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

245. “It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day. You wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake up in ignorance and by the evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “The caravans had once been pickup trucks, but now they were pulled by teams of horses on wheels of steel and wood. All of the pieces rendered useless by the end of gasoline had been removed – the engine, the fuel-supply system, all the other components that no one under the age of twenty had ever seen in operation – and a bench had been installed on top of each cab for the drivers.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel