Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “The flus came every season, but these were weak, inefficient viruses that struck down only the very old, the very young, and the very sick. And then came a virus like an avenging angel, unsurvivable, a microbe that reduced the population of the fallen world by, what? There were no more statisticians by then, my angels, but shall we say ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “We’ve admitted over two hundred flu patients since this morning,” Hua said. “A hundred and sixty in the past three hours. Fifteen of them have died. The ER’s full of new cases. We’ve got beds parked in hallways. Health Canada’s about to make an announcement.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

370. “The one thing in my life I have hated the most, out of a long list of things, is being told what to do. I.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

371. “It’s so difficult to picture your parents in the time before you existed. In memory, her mother was stranded forever at thirty-six.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

372. “I respected that, actually. She was doing a strange thing and she felt she didn’t owe me any explanation.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

373. “Management consulting. Based out of New York, new client in Los Angeles. I specialize in the repair and maintenance of faulty executives.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

374. “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

375. “I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

376. “He has a sense of waiting for something. But what?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

377. “Eli left her there. In the kitchen he found the pomegranate he’d bought for her and quartered it quickly on a pale blue plate. He thought the contrast between the shades of the pomegranate and the blue might please her. Any one of a number of details can prevent a ship from sinking.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

378. “There is only here, she told herself, there is only this house.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

380. “You could call it a performance, or you could call it presenting yourself in the best possible light, no different from putting on a suit and combing your hair.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

381. “He himself found it difficult to live in the present.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

382. “Paul remembered something he’d noticed before, which was that Tim seemed not to understand humour. It was like talking to an anthropologist from another planet. Paul thought that this should have created some kind of opening for friendship, but he couldn’t imagine how that conversation would begin- ‘I can’t help but notice that you’re as alienated as I am, can we compare notes?’.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

383. “I studied the history of work in university, and if there’s one historical constant over the centuries, it’s that no one especially wants to mess with HR.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

384. “My brother was a decade older than me,” he said. “I loved him, but when you’re a kid, a decade is like the space between galaxies. I never felt I knew him very well.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

385. “It was never very easy to reach her, like loving someone who was rarely in the same room.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

386. “You fall asleep for short periods and then for longer periods and then forever.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

387. “You know what I’ve learned about money? I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that’s when I realized that money is its own country.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

388. “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

389. “Lying about being married troubled her conscience, but not enough to make her want to flee. I’m paying a price for this life, she told herself, but the price is reasonable.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

390. “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

391. “There were several magnificent years of money and travel and then the lights went out.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

392. “The sky is aggressively blue.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

393. “Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

396. “That’s one thing I like about birthdays, they stay in one place. Same spot on the calendar, year in, year out.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “I believe the evening calls for fairies.”

— Emily St. John Mandel