Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “There were several magnificent years of money and travel and then the lights went out.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

403. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

405. “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. There were moments of true joy, actually, in this transient life. He loved sitting here on the beach with Marie. For all they’d lost, he often felt lucky to be here with her, in this life. But they were citizens of a shadow country that in his previous life he’d only dimly perceived, a country located at the edge of an abyss.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

406. “I remember thine eyes well enough,” Arthur said, distracted by the child version of Cordelia, and this was when it happened. There was a.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

413. “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

414. “I think you’d want to visit all those points in time,” Zoey said. “You’d want to speak with the letter writer in 1912, the video artist in 2019 or 2020, and the novelist in 2203.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

415. “She put on her headphones so she could pretend not to hear if anyone spoke to her and willed herself toward invisibility.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

416. “If nothing else, it’s pleasant to consider the possibility.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

421. “Theatre in Toronto. Earlier in the evening, three little girls had played a clapping game onstage as the audience entered, childhood versions of Lear’s daughters, and now they’d returned as hallucinations in the mad scene. The king stumbled and reached.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

422. “Maybe not everyone needs to have a specific ambition. I could be the sort of person who just goes to beautiful places and owns beautiful things. Maybe I could film five-minute videos of every sea and every ocean and perhaps there would be some meaning in that.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

423. “It’s just one future slipping away and being replaced by another.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

424. “It was beginning to dawn on her that she had traveled so long, so perfectly, that it was difficult to conceive of another kind of life. It was difficult to imagine stopping, but stopping as imminent.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

425. “He carried himself with the tedious confidence of all people with money, that breezy assumption that no serious harm could come to him.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

426. “Every life contains a measure of terrifying moments.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

427. “The premise of the company by which I’m employed,” Clark says, “is that if one’s the employer of an executive who’s worthy in some ways but deeply flawed in others, it’s sometimes cheaper to fix the executive than to replace him. Or her.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

428. “He knew that was just the way she handled stress – she evaded, she avoided, she removed herself, but by the end of the week she would come back to him.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

429. “Some people have families from the beginning,” he says. “Other people have to look a little harder.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

430. “I was grateful that my dog had slept through my younger self’s incompetence.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

431. “Clark disliked the general state of unshavenness, partly for aesthetic reasons and partly because he was a believer in the broken-windows theory of urban-crime management, the way the appearance of dereliction can pave the way for more serious crimes.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

432. “There had been countries, and borders. It was hard to explain. In.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

433. “None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in, so much so that she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her, other Vincents engaged in different events.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

434. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

437. “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

438. “Trinity bomb test in.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

440. “In the shadow country it was necessary to lie down every night with a fear so powerful that it felt to Leon like a physical presence, some malevolent beast that absorbs the light. He lay beside Marie and remembered that in this life there was no space for any kind of error or misfortune. What would happen to her if something happened to him?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

441. “He placed a package of frozen corn in his basket. What if this was the last time he ever performed this action, here in this particular store? It was an appealing thought.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

442. “His only part in the story: to observe and remember the chain of events. Not all of us will be cast in the greatest dramas. Someone has to remember them.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

443. “Are we being hunted?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

444. “Renata’s eyes, which were worried and doelike when Renata looked at her head-on but coolly confident when she was looking away. The effect was of two different people. Which to show?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

445. “If it had been anyone other than Hua, Jeevan wouldn’t have believed it, but he had never known a man with a greater gift for understatement. If Hua said there was an epidemic, then epidemic wasn’t a strong enough word.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

446. “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

447. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

449. “She didn’t know who was paying for the drink, but she knew it wasn’t her.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

450. “The night extended before me, all those magnificently empty hours shining with possibility.”

— Emily St. John Mandel