Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “They resumed their cautious progress.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

279. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

281. “If nothing else, it’s pleasant to consider the possibility. He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, toward another world just out of sight.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

282. “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

283. “You’re overdressed for the occasion,” Olivia said, but it came out softer than she intended, not at all sharp. Perhaps she could be a gentler person, she thought. Her shell was so hard in those days. “Can you take off your shirt?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

284. “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

285. “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

286. “The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

287. “Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

288. “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

289. “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

290. “You remembered.” “Of course,” Clark said. “That’s one thing I like about birthdays, they stay in one place. Same spot on the calendar, year in, year out.” “But the years keep going faster, have you noticed?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

295. “Lying about being married troubled her conscience, but not enough to make her want to flee. I’m paying a price for this life, she told herself, but the price is reasonable.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

296. “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

297. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

299. “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

300. “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