Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

210. “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

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. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

223. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curb, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you’re in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

230. “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

231. “No star burns forever.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

236. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

238. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

240. “Perhaps we believe on some level that if the world were to end and be remade, if some unthinkable catastrophe were to occur, then perhaps we might be remade too, perhaps into better, more heroic, more honorable people.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

241. “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

242. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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