Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “What, you’re not enjoying the atmosphere of barely suppressed panic?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

352. “Sartre: Hell is other people.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

353. “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

354. “It’s so difficult to picture your parents in the time before you existed. In.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

355. “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

356. “Sure, but in what other life would I get to perform Shakespeare?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

357. “They 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

358. “In a version of her life so distant that it now seemed like a fairytale.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

359. “There was a sound just then, a disturbance passing over the surface of the night as quickly as a stone dropped into water.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

360. “Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

362. “This one’s my other favorite. ‘He’s successful in interfacing with clients we already have, but as for new clients, it’s low-hanging fruit. He takes a high-altitude view, but he doesn’t drill down to that level of granularity where we might actionize new opportunities.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

363. “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

364. “Stick to musicians. I think we’re generally saner.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

366. “But what kind of man lies to his daughter about being married? There were aspects of the fairy tale that Vincent was careful not to think about too much at the time, and later her memories of those years had an abstracted quality, as if she’d stepped temporarily outside of herself.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

367. “You know how rare it is to work with someone who loves their life?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “A day later the first stranger walked in. They’d taken to posting guards with whistles, so that they might be warned of a stranger’s approach. They’d all seen the post-apocalyptic movies with the dangerous stragglers fighting it out for the last few scraps. Although actually when she thought about it, Annette said, the post-apocalyptic movies she’d seen had all involved zombies. “I’m just saying,” she said, “it could be much worse.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

372. “Had she seemed like herself lately? None of them were sure. What did it mean to seem like yourself, in the course of such unspeakable days? How was anyone supposed to seem?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

373. “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

374. “He felt a touch of vertigo. There had been a subtle shift in the room’s atmosphere. He was going forth into an incomprehensible world and the room was already receding into the past.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

375. “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

376. “But my point is, doesn’t it seem to you that the people who have the hardest time in this – this current era, whatever you want to call it, the world after the Georgia Flu – doesn’t it seem like the people who struggle the most with it are the people who remember the old world clearly?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

377. “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

378. “All those people,” Clark said to Imaginary Robert, but Imaginary Robert didn’t reply.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

379. “She observed the way the life of the city continued around her, indifferent and uninterrupted.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

380. “I’m talking about these people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

381. “It’s the fastest incubation period I’ve ever seen. I just saw a patient, she works as an orderly here at the hospital, on duty when the first patients started coming in this morning. She started feeling sick a few hours into her shift, went home early, her boyfriend drove her back in two hours ago and now she’s on a ventilator.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

382. “Charlie Wu was absolutely not standing in the darkest corner of the room, but there was still no need to look in that direction.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

383. “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

384. “Twenty years after the collapse, she loved the music of the Symphony, loved being a part of it, but found the Symphony’s insistence on performing Shakespeare insufferable. She tried to keep this opinion to herself and occasionally succeeded.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

385. “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

386. “Some places have elected mayors or they’re run by elected committees. Sometimes a cult takes over, and those towns are the most dangerous.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

387. “Trinity bomb test in.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

389. “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

390. “They resumed their cautious progress.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

391. “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

392. “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

393. “If only the evening would end. Vincent’s face was getting tired.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

394. “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

395. “Not all of us will be cast in the greatest dramas. Someone has to remember them.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

396. “Quietly in the night of an aneurysm when she was seventy-five.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

397. “I mean, for all we know,” the driver was saying, “there’s a universe where your book is real, I mean nonfictional!”

— Emily St. John Mandel

398. “I still have these moments where I think, Come on, this can’t possibly be it. I cannot possibly be expected to do something this awful day in and day out until the day I die. It’s like a life sentence imposed in the absence of a crime.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

400. “Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven.”

— Emily St. John Mandel