Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “In the evenings there were flocks of sandpipers, running over the sand so quickly that they gave the illusion of hovering an inch off the ground, their legs blurred like the animals in a Road Runner cartoon, comical but there was also something moving about the way they all somehow knew to switch direction at once.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

302. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

305. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

312. “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

313. “There are tens of thousands of ships at sea at any given moment and he liked to imagine each one as a point of light, converging into rivers of electric brilliance over the night oceans, flowing through the narrow channels of the Suez and Panama Canals, the Strait of Gibraltar, around the edges of continents and out into the oceans, an unceasing movement that drove countries, a secret world that he loved so much.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

314. “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

315. “Well, people were throwing change at me, so I did at one point decide to just turn my hat upside down in front of me, so that all the change would at least land in one place.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

318. “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

319. “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

320. “If the dreams of the last speaker of Chamicuro won’t survive the passage into another language, then what else has been lost? What else that was expressible in that language cannot be said in another? A language disappears, on average, every ten days. Last speakers die, words slip into memory, linguists struggle to preserve the remains. What every language comes down to, at the end, is one last speaker.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

321. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

323. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “There is too much world.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

330. “Sometimes order can be relentless.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

331. “We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

332. “Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

333. “The best Shakespearean actress in the territory, and her favorite line of text is from Star Trek.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

334. “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

335. “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

336. “Sartre: Hell is other people.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

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. “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

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

348. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel