Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “She wants to believe they’re lying in moonlight, but she knows the light through the window is probably mostly electric.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

265. “Ghosts of Vincent’s earlier selves flocked around the table and stared at the beautiful clothes she was wearing.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

268. “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

269. “Not merely pretty, he decides. She is actually beautiful, but it’s a subtle kind of beauty that takes some time to make itself apparent.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

270. “They’ve done what’s expected of them. They want to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “She had a window seat and was all but curled around her armrest, trying to stay as far from other people as possible. The surface of the moon rose out of blackness, bright from a distance and gray up close, the opaque bubbles of Colonies One, Two and Three gleaming in the sunlight.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

275. “We long only for the world we were born into.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

276. “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

277. “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

278. “The distance is unbearable if you let yourself dwell on it.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

279. “Sometimes order can be relentless.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

282. “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

283. “They resumed their cautious progress down the road, Kirsten gripping her knives so tightly that her heartbeat throbbed in the palms of her hands.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

284. “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

285. “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

286. “This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

287. “Violently beautiful sunsets could reduce her to tears. She was virtually incapacitated by fireflies. She was sublimely abnormal, and very frequently unnerving, but she was his psalm. What a live-in lover offers you, ultimately, is the unprecedented revelation of not being alone.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

288. “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

289. “There was something obnoxious, he thought, in people who introduced themselves by their surnames while calling one by one’s first.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

290. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

292. “She considered Dieter one of her dearest friends. The tattoo argument had lost all of its sting over the years and had become something like a familiar room where they met.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

293. “I’m sorry,” a woman named Tesch is saying now, to Clark, “what exactly is it that you do?” Tesch seems to be someone who mistakes rudeness for intellectual rigor.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

294. “What a wonderful thing, to get paid for doing what you love,” she says, and he agrees with this.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

295. “The night was dark and filled with movement, snow falling fast and silent, the cars parked in the street swelling into soft outlines of themselves.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

296. “They swore at airport management, at the TSA, at the airlines, at their useless phones, furious because fury was the last defense against understanding what the news stations were reporting.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

297. “Don’t think of that unspeakable decision, to keep the jet sealed rather than expose a packed airport to a fatal contagion. Don’t think about what enforcing that decision may have required. Don’t think about those last few hours on board. Snow.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

298. “We stand it because we were younger than you were when everything ended, Kirsten thought, but not young enough to remember nothing at all.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

299. “Are we supposed to believe that civilization has just come to an end?” “Well,” Clark offered, “it was always a little fragile, wouldn’t you say?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

300. “She’d never believed in love at first sight but she did believe in recognition at first sight, she believed in understanding upon meeting someone for the first time that they were going to be important in her life, a sensation like recognizing a familiar face in an old photograph: in a sea of faces that mean nothing, one comes into focus. You.”

— Emily St. John Mandel