Top 500 Emily St. John Mandel Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “There is a word in the Dakota language, gender-specific and untranslatable, that expresses the specific loneliness of mothers whose children are absent.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

403. “Now she had Leon’s former title, office, and telephone extension, though not his former salary.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

404. “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

405. “A life of solitude could be a very pleasant thing.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

408. “Twenty years after the collapse they were still in motion, traveling back and forth along the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan, west as far as Traverse City, east and north over the 49th parallel to Kincardine. They followed the St. Clair River south to the fishing towns of Marine City and Algonac and back again. This territory was for the most part tranquil now.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

409. “She’d set out before dawn with the sense of embarking on a mission, but after the verdict came down, she almost wished she’d stayed home. She couldn’t have hoped for a longer sentence, and yet there was a curious sense of anti-climax.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

410. “We are living in a simulation, I told myself, as the trolley stopped a block from my apartment, but this fell so far short of, well, of the reality, for lack of a better word. I couldn’t convince myself. I didn’t believe it. 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

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

419. “I have colleagues who resent the general public’s ignorance of the industry, but I think the fact that you don’t have to think about it proves that the whole system works.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

420. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

423. “The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step.”

— 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. “You look like an executive,” she said to herself in the mirror, and the thought that flitted behind this was You look like a stranger. She pushed it away.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

427. “Painting was something that had grabbed hold of her for a while, decades, but now it had let go and she had no further interest in it, or it had no further interest in her. All things end, she’d told herself, there was always going to be a last painting, but if she wasn’t a painter, what was she? It was a troubling question.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

428. “What a pleasant state of affairs, he’d been thinking lately, to be with a woman who didn’t hold a grudge.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

430. “Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They’re all immortal to me.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

432. “There was not, in fact, an email gun. Although that would’ve been nice. I would’ve preferred that.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

433. “There are tens of thousands of ships at sea at any given moment and he liked to imagine each one as a point of light, converging into rivers of electric brilliance over the night oceans, flowing through the narrow channels of the Suez and Panama Canals, the Strait of Gibraltar, around the edges of continents and out into the oceans, an unceasing movement that drove countries, a secret world that he loved so much.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

434. “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

435. “Adulthood’s full of ghosts.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

437. “What if one were to dissolve into the wilderness like salt into water. He wants to go home. For the first time, Edwin begins to worry about his sanity.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

438. “Well, people were throwing change at me, so I did at one point decide to just turn my hat upside down in front of me, so that all the change would at least land in one place.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

440. “Ambulances drove down the beach to collect ATV drivers three or four times a day.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

441. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

448. “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

449. “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

450. “It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day. You wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake up in ignorance and by the evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here.”

— Emily St. John Mandel