Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Sure, but in what other life would I get to perform Shakespeare?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

304. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “The forest had crept up to the edges of the school parking lot and sent an advance party out toward the building, small trees growing through cracks in the pavement. There were a few cars parked on flat tires. “Let’s watch for a moment,” August said, and they stood for a while at the edge of the woods.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

311. “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

312. “Do you think he’d describe himself as unhappy in his work?” “No,” Dahlia said, “because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You know what I mean?” “No, please elaborate.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

313. “I loved it and I always wanted to escape.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

314. “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

315. “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

316. “Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. The arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you with seemingly no intermediate step.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

325. “The vision made him profoundly sad. He could live without retirement savings. No one in this country actually starves to death. It’s just one future slipping away and being replaced by another. He had his health. They could sell the house. He found a padded bench away from other people, near the entrance to the hotel casino, and called his wife.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

326. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

328. “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

329. “No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

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. “There was not, in fact, an email gun. Although that would’ve been nice. I would’ve preferred that.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

337. “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

338. “The sky is aggressively blue.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

339. “What if one were to dissolve into the wilderness like salt into water.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

341. “It wasn’t her fault that the world she’d grown up in had ceased to exist.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

342. “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

343. “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

344. “If there was ever a time when she had some control over her working life, she’d decided, she wouldn’t work under fluorescent lights. Was there some way she could work outside? She didn’t see how – she had an indoor skill set – but the thought was appealing.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

345. “She hasn’t smoked in a while, managed to convince herself that smoking is disgusting, but it’s a pleasure, actually, more of a pleasure than she remembered. The lit end flares in the darkness when she inhales. She likes Hollywood best at night, in the quiet, when it’s all dark leaves and shadows and night-blooming flowers, the edges softened, gently lit streets curving up into the hills.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

346. “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

347. “There was a moment of doubt on the way to the cash registers, straining against the weight of the cart – was he overreacting? – but he was committed, he’d decided, too late to turn back.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

348. “The truth is,” Olive said, behind a lectern in Paris, “even now, all these centuries later, for all our technological advances, all our scientific knowledge of illness, we still don’t always know why one person gets sick and another doesn’t, or why one patient survives and another dies. Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

349. “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

350. “What, you’re not enjoying the atmosphere of barely suppressed panic?”

— Emily St. John Mandel