Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

402. “It wasn’t her fault that the world she’d grown up in had ceased to exist.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

403. “You know,” Jeevan had said, “in the movie version of this there’s the apocalypse, and then afterward – ” “What makes you think we’ll make it to afterward?” Frank was always so goddamned calm about everything.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

404. “Why was a shipping conference being held in a desert city? Because Las Vegas hotel rooms are cheap. Because the desert is a sea.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

405. “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

406. “She hasn’t smoked in a while, managed to convince herself that smoking is disgusting, but it’s a pleasure, actually, more of a pleasure than she remembered. The lit end flares in the darkness when she inhales. She likes Hollywood best at night, in the quiet, when it’s all dark leaves and shadows and night-blooming flowers, the edges softened, gently lit streets curving up into the hills.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

407. “He makes a careful inventory of his thoughts and decides that he isn’t unhappy. He just desires no further movement, for the time being. If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

408. “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

409. “There was a moment of doubt on the way to the cash registers, straining against the weight of the cart – was he overreacting? – but he was committed, he’d decided, too late to turn back.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

410. “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

411. “They’ve done what’s expected of them. They want to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

412. “I’m sorry,” a woman named Tesch is saying now, to Clark, “what exactly is it that you do?” Tesch seems to be someone who mistakes rudeness for intellectual rigor.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

413. “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

414. “She stopped for a decaf latte at a Starbucks and was struck by the barista’s brilliant green hair. “Your hair’s beautiful,” she said, and the barista smiled.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

415. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

417. “When he tells people in Toronto that he’s from British Columbia, they’ll invariably say something about how they like Vancouver, as though that glass city four hours and two ferries to the southeast of his childhood home has anything to do with the island where he grew up.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

418. “They were rats because in all the books the driver had read that involved helpful talking animals, the animals were just too big. Horses and dragons and whatnot. But how do you discreetly move through the world with a dragon or a horse? It’s untenable. Try taking a horse into a bar sometime. No, what you want, she said, is a pocket-sized animal sidekick, a rat for example.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

419. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

424. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

427. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

432. “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

433. “She hopes she isn’t as awkward to other people as she feels to herself.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

434. “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

435. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

437. “It’s possible to both know and not know something,” he said later under cross-examination, and the state tore him to pieces over this. But he spoke for several of us actually, several of us who’d been thinking a great deal about that doubleness, that knowing and not knowing, being honorable and not being honorable, knowing you’re not a good person but trying to be a good person regardless around the margins of the bad.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

438. “Forgive me,” Olive said, “I fear there’s a problem with my translator bot. I thought you said he was kind to care for his own child.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

439. “This one’s my other favorite. ‘He’s successful in interfacing with clients we already have, but as for new clients, it’s low-hanging fruit. He takes a high-altitude view, but he doesn’t drill down to that level of granularity where we might actionize new opportunities.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

440. “Stick to musicians. I think we’re generally saner.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

441. “But what kind of man lies to his daughter about being married? There were aspects of the fairy tale that Vincent was careful not to think about too much at the time, and later her memories of those years had an abstracted quality, as if she’d stepped temporarily outside of herself.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

442. “You know how rare it is to work with someone who loves their life?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

443. “A day later the first stranger walked in. They’d taken to posting guards with whistles, so that they might be warned of a stranger’s approach. They’d all seen the post-apocalyptic movies with the dangerous stragglers fighting it out for the last few scraps. 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

444. “Vincent was asleep beside him, breathing quietly, and her hair was like a pool of ink in the room’s dim light.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

445. “Clark liked to think he knew London but the truth was he’d spent most of his adult life in New York, secure within the confines of Manhattan’s idiot-proof grid, and on this particular evening London’s tangle of streets was inscrutable.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

446. “Still, just to go there and see it.” An unspoken understanding: neither of them would leave this continent again.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

447. “Our guests in Caiette want to come to the wilderness, but they don’t want to be in the wilderness. They just want to look at it, ideally through the window of a luxury hotel. They want to be wilderness-adjacent. The point here” – he touched the white star with one finger, and Walter admired his manicure – “is extraordinary luxury in an unexpected setting. There’s an element of surrealism to it, frankly. It’s a five-star experience in a place where your cell phone doesn’t work.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

448. “I switch on the camera as I hear the thunder, and I record the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, lightning flashing over the roiling ocean. In a storm, the waves are like mountains. Cold rain in my face and I know it’s on the lens but this, too, will be beautiful, the blurring and the raindrops.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

449. “Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

450. “No more avatars.”

— Emily St. John Mandel