Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “Sartre: Hell is other people.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

318. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

320. “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.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

321. “Sometimes order can be relentless.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

324. “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

325. “Sweep me up. It has a certain beauty, don’t you think?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

326. “There is a word in the Dakota language, gender-specific and untranslatable, that expresses the specific loneliness of mothers whose children are absent.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

327. “Now she had Leon’s former title, office, and telephone extension, though not his former salary.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

330. “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

331. “She’d set out before dawn with the sense of embarking on a mission, but after the verdict came down, she almost wished she’d stayed home. She couldn’t have hoped for a longer sentence, and yet there was a curious sense of anti-climax.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

332. “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

333. “I have colleagues who resent the general public’s ignorance of the industry, but I think the fact that you don’t have to think about it proves that the whole system works.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “Ambulances drove down the beach to collect ATV drivers three or four times a day.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

339. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

344. “Is this your first time staying with us?” a woman at a reception desk for the third or fourth hotel said to her, and Olive wasn’t sure how to answer, because if you’ve stayed in one Marriott, haven’t you stayed in all of them?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

348. “She’d never fainted before but surely this was what it felt like, this terrible lightheadedness, the awareness of being just at the edge of an abyss.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

349. “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

350. “When you met your husband, what was your first clue that you loved him?” “Well,” Olive said, “I guess just a sense of recognition, if that makes sense. I remember the first time I saw him, I looked at him and I knew he’d be important in my life. Is that a clue, though?”

— Emily St. John Mandel