Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “What do you live for?” “Truth and beauty,” he says, deadpan.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “They resumed their cautious progress.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

259. “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

260. “Your parents bring you into this world, and then they move on without you and leave you behind. I know that that’s the natural order of things, Z., and yet the pain of that whole arrangement is incredible, isn’t it? We’re all staggering around brokenhearted. By “arrangement” I mean “mortality”, I guess. The grief fades with time but we stay abandoned.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

262. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

264. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

267. “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

268. “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

269. “And for me, now as then, it is too much. There is too much world.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

271. “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

272. “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

273. “A life of solitude could be a very pleasant thing.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

274. “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

275. “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

276. “The best Shakespearean actress in the territory, and her favorite line of text is from Star Trek.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

277. “There is a pay phone by a truck stop near the town of Leonard, Arizona. Sometimes at night it starts to ring.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

278. “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

279. “Think of how holograms and virtual reality have evolved, even just in the past few years. If we can run fairly convincing simulations of reality now, think of what those simulations will be like in a century or two. The idea with the simulation hypothesis is, we can’t rule out the possibility that all of reality is a simulation.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

280. “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

281. “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

282. “There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

283. “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

284. “The flus came every season, but these were weak, inefficient viruses that struck down only the very old, the very young, and the very sick. And then came a virus like an avenging angel, unsurvivable, a microbe that reduced the population of the fallen world by, what? There were no more statisticians by then, my angels, but shall we say ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

285. “You’re showing your hand. You can’t let people see how hard you’re trying.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

286. “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

287. “What if one were to dissolve into the wilderness like salt into water. He wants to go home. For the first time, Edwin begins to worry about his sanity.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

289. “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

290. “Twenty years after the collapse they were still in motion, traveling back and forth along the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan, west as far as Traverse City, east and north over the 49th parallel to Kincardine. They followed the St. Clair River south to the fishing towns of Marine City and Algonac and back again. This territory was for the most part tranquil now.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

291. “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

292. “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

293. “You don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’re going.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

294. “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

295. “It isn’t his fault that his days are so similar that he keeps sliding into memories, or into the couterlife, although it is troubling that his memories and the counterlife have started blurring together.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “Or perhaps it’s just this: memory is too unreliable to entrust a story to the hero alone. Someone else has to have observed the chain of events to lend credibility; if no one else remembers your story, how are you to prove that it was real?”

— Emily St. John Mandel