Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “Well, by midmorning we’ve got twelve more patients, same symptoms, turns out they were all on the same flight. They all say they started feeling sick on the plane.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

254. “A liquid movement below on the tarmac; a cat, hunting in the shadows.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

255. “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

256. “What do you live for?” “Truth and beauty,” he says, deadpan.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

257. “The light we carry within us is the ark that carried Noah and his people over the face of the terrible waters, and I submit that we were saved” – his voice was rising – “not only to bring the light, to spread the light, but to be the light.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

258. “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

259. “Can a house be haunted by failure?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

260. “Is there an unease that’s specific to the sense of an invisible bureaucracy in motion around you?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

261. “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

262. “Sometimes a cult takes over, and those towns are the most dangerous. DIALLO: In what sense? RAYMONDE: In the sense that they’re unpredictable. You can’t argue with them, because they live by an entirely different logic.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

263. “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

264. “In the evenings there were flocks of sandpipers, running over the sand so quickly that they gave the illusion of hovering an inch off the ground, their legs blurred like the animals in a Road Runner cartoon, comical but there was also something moving about the way they all somehow knew to switch direction at once.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

265. “There’s still a world out there,” Jeevan said, “outside this apartment.” “I think there’s just survival out there, Jeevan. I think you should go out there and try to survive.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

266. “Sure, but in what other life would I get to perform Shakespeare?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “It’s the fastest incubation period I’ve ever seen. I just saw a patient, she works as an orderly here at the hospital, on duty when the first patients started coming in this morning. She started feeling sick a few hours into her shift, went home early, her boyfriend drove her back in two hours ago and now she’s on a ventilator.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

271. “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

272. “They resumed their cautious progress.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

273. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

275. “What if it always is the end of the world?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

276. “He makes a careful inventory of his thoughts and decides that he isn’t unhappy. He just desires no further movement, for the time being. If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness. He spends his days walking on the beach, sketching, contemplating the sea from the porch, reading, playing.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

277. “Not quite a room, Jeevan thought now, looking around the stage. It was too transitory, all those doorways and dark spaces between wings, the missing ceiling. It was more like a terminal, he thought, a train station or an airport, everyone passing quickly through.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

278. “She’d started paying her own rent at seventeen. How had she become so dependent on another person? Of course the answer was depressingly obvious: she had slipped into dependency because dependency was easier.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

279. “She lived in Praha, and – ” “Oh,” Clark says, “I believe when you’re speaking English, you’re allowed to refer to it as Prague.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

280. “Jeevan’s understanding of disaster preparedness was based entirely on action movies, but on the other hand, he’d seen a lot of action movies. He.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

281. “Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They’re all immortal to me.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

282. “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

283. “When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

284. “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

285. “Years later in Toronto, on the plywood second story of the King Lear set, the words clarified the problem. He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

287. “A secretary is a keeper of secrets.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

288. “The one thing in my life I have hated the most out of a long list of things, is being told what to do. I can tolerate it in a kitchen but not in the bedroom, and I tell him that.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

289. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” said Edwin. “Actually, no, that’s not true. I do know. I am absolutely certain there was not a single thought in my head. It was like a kind of void.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

290. “He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, toward another world just out of sight.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

291. “You cannot be both an unwashed bohemian and Cary Grant.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

292. “Money was mysterious to Olivia, but Monica had been a lawyer before she retired and had a much better grasp of the logistics of daily life.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

293. “The things we see when we’re young, sometimes they don’t stay with us.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

294. “Fomites aren’t a major mode of transmission with Covid-19,” Gaspery said. Fomites? Covid-19? Mirella had never heard either term, and the other two were frowning too. “Oh, right,” Gaspery said, seemingly to himself, “it’s only January.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

295. “How could so many die so quickly? The numbers seemed impossible.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

296. “About how you can skate over the surface of the world for your entire life, visiting, leaving, without ever really falling through. But you can’t do that, it isn’t good enough. You have to be able to fall through. You have to be able to sink, to immerse yourself. You can’t just skate over the surface and visit and leave.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

297. “He’d been hearing rumors lately of carfentanil in the supply line, which terrified him: one hundred times stronger than fentanyl, approved for the sole purpose of tranquilizing elephants.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

298. “SUGGESTED READING Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood The Passage by Justin Cronin The Dog Stars by Peter Heller The Stand by Stephen King The Road by Cormac McCarthy Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell King Lear by William Shakespeare A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

299. “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

300. “If Hua said there was an epidemic, then epidemic wasn’t a strong enough word. Jeevan was crushed by a sudden certainty that this was it, that this illness Hua was describing was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life.”

— Emily St. John Mandel