Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

304. “Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

305. “But all of this raises an interesting question,” Olive said. “What if it always is the end of the world?” She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

306. “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

307. “You know,” Jeevan had said, “in the movie version of this there’s the apocalypse, and then afterward – ” “What makes you think we’ll make it to afterward?” Frank was always so goddamned calm about everything.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

308. “She’d pressed her forehead to the window and saw clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations linked by roads or alone. The beauty of it, the loneliness, the thought of all those people living out their lives, each porch light marking another house, another family.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

309. “There is too much world.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

310. “Wait,” I said, “my cat’s from another century?” “Your cat’s from 1985,” she said. “What,” I said, at a loss for words.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

311. “Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin. “Evidence suggests they feel rather more oppressed by the British than by the heat,” Edwin said.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

312. “Why was a shipping conference being held in a desert city? Because Las Vegas hotel rooms are cheap. Because the desert is a sea.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

313. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

317. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “He remembered being here with Clark at three or four sometimes five in the morning, during what seemed at the time like adulthood and seemed in retrospect like a dream.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

324. “In their late thirties they’d decided not to have children, which at the time seemed like a sensible way to avoid unnecessary complications and heartbreak, and this decision had lent their lives a certain ease that he’d always appreciated, a sense of blissful unencumberance. But an encumbrance might also be thought of as an anchor, and what he’d found himself thinking lately was that he wouldn’t mind being more anchored to this earth.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

325. “I believe the evening calls for fairies.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

326. “The sofa was much dirtier in real life than in the paintings.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

327. “He knew that was just the way she handled stress – she evaded, she avoided, she removed herself, but by the end of the week she would come back to him.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

328. “Here in the warmth and dim lighting, with scents of coffee and cheesecake in the air, Nina Simone on the sound system, the gripped feeling in her chest was beginning to subside.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

329. “The premise of the company by which I’m employed,” Clark says, “is that if one’s the employer of an executive who’s worthy in some ways but deeply flawed in others, it’s sometimes cheaper to fix the executive than to replace him. Or her.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

330. “You know the phrase I keep thinking about?” a poet asked, on a different panel, at a festival in Copenhagen. “The chickens are coming home to roost.′ Because it’s never good chickens. It’s never ‘You’ve been a good person and now your chickens are coming home to roost.’ It’s never good chickens. It’s always bad chickens.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

331. “We sent an agent back to another century,” Zoey said, “but the agent fell in love with someone and didn’t want to come home, so she removed her own tracker, fed it to a cat, and then when we tried to forcibly return her to the present, the cat appeared in the travel chamber instead of her.” “Wait,” I said, “my cat’s from another century?” “Your cat’s from 1985,” she said. “What,” I said, at a loss for words.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

332. “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

333. “They were rats because in all the books the driver had read that involved helpful talking animals, the animals were just too big. Horses and dragons and whatnot. But how do you discreetly move through the world with a dragon or a horse? It’s untenable. Try taking a horse into a bar sometime. No, what you want, she said, is a pocket-sized animal sidekick, a rat for example.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

334. “An interesting question,” Olive said, “which I’d like to consider in these last few minutes, is why there’s been such interest in postapocalyptic literature over this past decade or so. I’ve had the tremendous good fortune of getting to travel a great deal in the service of Marienbad –.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

335. “She liked electronica, mostly ’80s stuff that didn’t move him, New Order singing about a thousand islands in the sea.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

336. “I should have done more for her, Clark thought. I should have pulled her back from the edge. But it had taken everything he had to stay back from the edge himself, and what could he have done?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

338. “At the last moment, he added a bouquet of daffodils.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

340. “Was she hallucinating? She was alert for signs of madness as she walked uptown through the gray city but saw nothing else that seemed obviously unreal.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

341. “It wasn’t only exhaustion, Jeevan realized. Hua was afraid.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

342. “One of them shrugged and pulled the blanket down to fit an oxygen mask over Arthur’s face. Jeevan realized this charade must be for Arthur’s family, so they wouldn’t be notified of his death via the evening news. He was moved by the decency of it.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

343. “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

344. “The century was ending and he had some complaints.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

345. “You don’t have to be a terrible person to intentionally try to change the time line. You just have to have a moment of weakness. Really just a moment. When I say weakness, I might mean something more like humanity.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

346. “She put on her headphones and listened to electronica – an epiphany from childhood: when all lies in disarray there’s still order in music.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

347. “She had real potential. Real potential. But an inability to recognize opportunity? That right there is a fatal flaw.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

348. “I like waitresses with tattoos. It implies the existene of a secret life.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

349. “Theatre in Toronto. Earlier in the evening, three little girls had played a clapping game onstage as the audience entered, childhood versions of Lear’s daughters, and now they’d returned as hallucinations in the mad scene. The king stumbled and reached.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

350. “The point is she raised herself into a new life by sheer force of will,” Vincent’s mother had said, and Vincent wondered even at the time – she would have been about eleven – what that statement might suggest about how happy Vincent’s mother was about the way her own life had gone, this woman who’d imagined writing poetry in the wilderness but somehow found herself sunk in the mundane difficulties of raising a child and running a household in the wilderness instead.”

— Emily St. John Mandel