Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

404. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

406. “He began to feed her pomegranate beads, two or three at a time, and she stopped weeping long before her lips were stained red.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

407. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

409. “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

410. “The next cart was all toilet paper.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

411. “It was impossible not to think in that moment of the master bedroom suite in Jonathan’s house in Greenwich, the wasteful acres of carpeting and empty space. Luxury is a weakness.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

412. “The thing with being away from her husband and daughter was that every hotel room was emptier than the one before.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

413. “There was a scheduled rainfall in – I glanced at my watch – two minutes. I stepped out of the trolley and walked very slowly, on purpose. I’ve always loved, rain, and knowing that it isn’t coming from clouds doesn’t make me love it less.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

414. “The scale of the catastrophe was objectively enormous – We owned a home, and then we lost it – but there was such relief in no longer having to think about the house, the vertiginous mortgage payments and constant upkeep.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

415. “She had real potential. Real potential. But an inability to recognize opportunity? That right there is a fatal flaw.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

416. “I like waitresses with tattoos. It implies the existene of a secret life.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

420. “Leon hadn’t understood, and he’d given Alkaitis his retirement savings anyway. He didn’t insist on a detailed explanation. One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

421. “I mean, here’s the question,” Joelle said, “and I’d be genuinely interested to hear your thoughts: How did he know we’d do it? Would anyone do something like this, given enough money, or is there something special about us? Did he look at me one day and just think, That woman seems conveniently lacking in a moral center, that person seems well suited to participate in a –.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

423. “So we don’t own the building,” the director said, “but we hold a ten-thousand-year lease on the space.” “You’re right. That’s magnificent.” “Nineteenth-century hubris. Imagine thinking civilization would still exist in ten thousand years. But there’s more.” She leaned forward, paused for effect. “The lease is renewable.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

425. “The sofa was much dirtier in real life than in the paintings.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

426. “Here in the warmth and dim lighting, with scents of coffee and cheesecake in the air, Nina Simone on the sound system, the gripped feeling in her chest was beginning to subside.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

427. “You know the phrase I keep thinking about?” a poet asked, on a different panel, at a festival in Copenhagen. “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

428. “She liked electronica, mostly ’80s stuff that didn’t move him, New Order singing about a thousand islands in the sea.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

429. “Because we are always looking for the former world, before all the traces of the former world are gone.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

430. “Vincent realized that she felt perfectly at ease, for the first time in recent memory. The truth was that in the kingdom of money, before she’d met Mirella she’d been extremely alone.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

431. “Vincent was lovely but not, Olivia had decided, a serious person. Since her late teens she had been mentally dividing people into categories: either you’re a serious person, she’d long ago decided, or you’re not. A difficulty of her current life was that she was no longer sure which category she fell into.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

432. “Edwin’s gaze drifted away from the man’s face, to the mild decrepitude of the September garden. The salvias were bare now, for the most part, brown stalks and dried leaves, a few last blooms wisping blue and violet in the failing light. He was struck by an understanding of what his life could be from this moment: he could live here quietly, and care for the garden, and that might eventually be enough.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

433. “Sayid carried himself with a regality that Kirsten had fallen in love with once.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

434. “What inspired Edwin to speak just then? He found himself dwelling on the matter years later, at war, in the terminal horror and boredom of the trenches. Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

435. “Erin Arvedlund’s Too Good to Be True and Diana B. Henriques’s The Wizard of Lies.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

436. “Sasha found herself at a loss for words. What am I asking you? I’m asking you if I was complicit in something unspeakable, because Anna, Anna, I already carry so much.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

439. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

445. “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

446. “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

447. “I’m saying his only contact with the other patients was speaking with one of them about where to board the hotel shuttle.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

448. “She had been overtipping for as long as she’d had money. These small compensations for how fortunate she’d been.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

449. “It’s like the moment just before sleep, when you’re not quite unconscious – you’re awake enough to realize that you’re falling asleep – but your thoughts and your memories begin unspooling into narrative and you realize you have already started to dream: one last moment of waking, choking on saltwater...”

— Emily St. John Mandel

450. “Vincent swam every night to strengthen her will because she was desperately afraid of drowning.”

— Emily St. John Mandel