Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “There is too much world.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

307. “Money was mysterious to Olivia, but Monica had been a lawyer before she retired and had a much better grasp of the logistics of daily life.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

308. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

310. “About how you can skate over the surface of the world for your entire life, visiting, leaving, without ever really falling through. But you can’t do that, it isn’t good enough. You have to be able to fall through. You have to be able to sink, to immerse yourself. You can’t just skate over the surface and visit and leave.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

317. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “Sartre: Hell is other people.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

328. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

330. “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

331. “Sometimes order can be relentless.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

333. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

335. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

349. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel