Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “We sent an agent back to another century,” Zoey said, “but the agent fell in love with someone and didn’t want to come home, so she removed her own tracker, fed it to a cat, and then when we tried to forcibly return her to the present, the cat appeared in the travel chamber instead of her.” “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “And for me, now as then, it is too much. There is too much world.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

405. “At the last moment, he added a bouquet of daffodils.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

407. “Was she hallucinating? She was alert for signs of madness as she walked uptown through the gray city but saw nothing else that seemed obviously unreal.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

409. “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

410. “The century was ending and he had some complaints.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

411. “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

412. “She put on her headphones and listened to electronica – an epiphany from childhood: when all lies in disarray there’s still order in music.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

415. “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

416. “What, you’re not enjoying the atmosphere of barely suppressed panic?”

— 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. “The prairies are initially interesting, then tedious, then unsettling. There’s too much of them, that’s the problem. The scale is wrong. The train crawls like a millipede through endless grass. He can see from horizon to horizon. He feels terribly overexposed.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

419. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

421. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

424. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

427. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

429. “Or perhaps it’s just this: memory is too unreliable to entrust a story to the hero alone. Someone else has to have observed the chain of events to lend credibility; if no one else remembers your story, how are you to prove that it was real?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

430. “We knew it was coming but we behaved inconsistently. We stocked up on supplies – just in case – but sent our children to school, because how do you get any work done with the kids at home?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

444. “Trinity bomb test in.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

445. “Or maybe just an amphetamine freak? Clark’s thoughts wandered to a particularly exciting week in Toronto, eighteen or nineteen years old, when he and Arthur had accepted some pills from a new friend at a dance club and stayed up for seventy-two hours straight.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

446. “We’re so lucky to be in this position, all of us who make our living as actors, and I find complaints about invasion of privacy to be disingenuous, frankly. I mean, let’s be real here, we wanted to be famous, right?”

— Emily St. John Mandel

447. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

449. “It isn’t his fault that his days are so similar that he keeps sliding into memories, or into the couterlife, although it is troubling that his memories and the counterlife have started blurring together.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel