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

402. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

405. “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

406. “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

407. “Trinity bomb test in.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

410. “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

411. “Are we being hunted?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “Do you want to grab a quick drink or something?” he asked Simone. “No,” Simone said. “Are you sure?” “You’re pretty much the last person I’d want to get a drink with.” “Okay, got it. You could just say no.” “I did.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

421. “Luxury is a weakness.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

422. “I should have done more for her, Clark thought. I should have pulled her back from the edge. But it had taken everything he had to stay back from the edge himself, and what could he have done?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

423. “It wasn’t only exhaustion, Jeevan realized. Hua was afraid.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

424. “One of them shrugged and pulled the blanket down to fit an oxygen mask over Arthur’s face. Jeevan realized this charade must be for Arthur’s family, so they wouldn’t be notified of his death via the evening news. He was moved by the decency of it.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

425. “You don’t have to be a terrible person to intentionally try to change the time line. You just have to have a moment of weakness. Really just a moment. When I say weakness, I might mean something more like humanity.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

426. “There’s such happiness in a successful escape.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

427. “Why are the righteous so often irritating? “She couldn’t be happier,” Joelle said. “She loves that she was right.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

428. “So in order for your scheme to succeed for as long as it did, a great many people had to believe in a story that didn’t actually make sense. But everyone was making money, so no one cared, except Ella Kaspersky.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

429. “It was difficult to be alive in the world.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

430. “If her parents loved her,” Meiying said, “it would have felt like the end of the world.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

431. “I was pleased as I said this, because I’d never really thought of myself in this way before, but it seemed to me that I’d been paying close attention my entire life. I hadn’t been successful at very many things, but I’d always been good at watching.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

435. “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

436. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

438. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

440. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

442. “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

443. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel