Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

355. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

357. “There is too much world.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

362. “Sometimes order can be relentless.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

366. “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

367. “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

368. “Sartre: Hell is other people.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “You’re showing your hand. You can’t let people see how hard you’re trying.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

395. “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

396. “There was not, in fact, an email gun. Although that would’ve been nice. I would’ve preferred that.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “She tried to keep this opinion to herself and occasionally succeeded.”

— Emily St. John Mandel