Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “The prairies are initially interesting, then tedious, then unsettling. There’s too much of them, that’s the problem. The scale is wrong. The train crawls like a millipede through endless grass. He can see from horizon to horizon. He feels terribly overexposed.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

352. “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

353. “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

354. “She stopped for a decaf latte at a Starbucks and was struck by the barista’s brilliant green hair. “Your hair’s beautiful,” she said, and the barista smiled.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

355. “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

356. “In that first year after our mother died, my thoughts often veered toward disaster.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

357. “When he tells people in Toronto that he’s from British Columbia, they’ll invariably say something about how they like Vancouver, as though that glass city four hours and two ferries to the southeast of his childhood home has anything to do with the island where he grew up.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

358. “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

359. “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

360. “He isn’t above a little gaslighting, if that’s what it takes to stay out of prison.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

361. “Or maybe just an amphetamine freak? Clark’s thoughts wandered to a particularly exciting week in Toronto, eighteen or nineteen years old, when he and Arthur had accepted some pills from a new friend at a dance club and stayed up for seventy-two hours straight.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

362. “We’re so lucky to be in this position, all of us who make our living as actors, and I find complaints about invasion of privacy to be disingenuous, frankly. I mean, let’s be real here, we wanted to be famous, right?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

363. “It isn’t his fault that his days are so similar that he keeps sliding into memories, or into the couterlife, although it is troubling that his memories and the counterlife have started blurring together.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

364. “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

365. “Or perhaps it’s just this: memory is too unreliable to entrust a story to the hero alone. Someone else has to have observed the chain of events to lend credibility; if no one else remembers your story, how are you to prove that it was real?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

366. “We knew it was coming but we behaved inconsistently. We stocked up on supplies – just in case – but sent our children to school, because how do you get any work done with the kids at home?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

368. “No, it’s just, if everything happens for a reason,” Elizabeth persists, “as personally, I believe that it does, then when I hear a story of how two people came together, it’s like a piece of the plan is being revealed.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

371. “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

372. “You look like an executive,” she said to herself in the mirror, and the thought that flitted behind this was You look like a stranger. She pushed it away.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

377. “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

378. “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

379. “He was utterly unnerved by the crowd. They were shaking hands, which even after all of his cultural-sensitivity training seemed like a bizarre thing to do in flu season, and kissing one another on the cheek. These people have no direct experience of pandemics, he reminded himself. None of them were old enough to remember the winter of 1918–1919; Ebola was a few years out and would mostly be confined to the other side of the Atlantic; Covid-19 would not arrive for another thirteen years.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

381. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

383. “There is too much world.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

384. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

386. “Sometimes order can be relentless.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

387. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

389. “No one does. You go to the store, you buy a banana, you don’t think about the men who piloted the banana through the Panama Canal. Why would you?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “Sartre: Hell is other people.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

394. “A sudden memory: drinking chai tea with.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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