Emily St. John Mandel Quotes & Sayings

had been installed on top of each cab for the drivers. The cabs were stripped of everything that added excess weight but left otherwise intact, with doors that closed and windows of difficult-to-break automobile glass, — Emily St. John Mandel

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

paper fell out of the book. It was a page torn from — Emily St. John Mandel

The night sky was brighter than it had been. On the clearest nights the stars were a cloud of light across the breadth of the sky, extravagant in their multitudes . . . The era of light pollution had come to an end. The increasing brilliance meant the grid was failing, darkness pooling over the earth. I was here for the end of electricity. The thought sent shivers up Clark's spine. — Emily St. John Mandel

The house is silent now and she feels like a stranger here. "This life was never ours," she whispers to the dog, who has been following her from room to room, and Luli wags her tail and stares at Miranda with wet brown eyes. "We were only ever borrowing it. — Emily St. John Mandel

he had an idea - too sentimental to speak aloud and he knew none of his divorced friends would ever own up to it - that something must linger, a half-life of marriage, some sense memory of love even if obviously not the thing itself. He thought these people must mean something to one another, even if they didn't like one another anymore. — Emily St. John Mandel

Stick to musicians. I think we're generally saner. — Emily St. John Mandel

This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air. Finally whispering the same two words over and over: "Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking. — Emily St. John Mandel

They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin. — Emily St. John Mandel

What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you've lost. — Emily St. John Mandel

Was nervous about seeing him, partly because I find him less interesting now than I did when we were both nineteen (unkind of me to admit, but can't we be honest about how people change?), — Emily St. John Mandel

He closed the fridge door, made his last breakfast - scrambled eggs - and showered, dressed, combed his hair, left for the theater an hour early so he'd have time to linger with the newspaper over his second-to-last coffee at his favorite coffee place, all of the small details that comprise a morning, a life. — Emily St. John Mandel

standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together. — Emily St. John Mandel

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

No one had any idea, it turned out. None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended. — Emily St. John Mandel

If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you. — Emily St. John Mandel

You know where I'm from," he said, and she understood what he meant by this. Once we lived on an island in the ocean. Once we took the ferry to go to high school, and at night the sky was brilliant in the absence of all these city lights. Once we paddled canoes to the lighthouse to look at petroglyphs and fished for salmon and walked through deep forests, but all of this was completely unremarkable because everyone else we knew did these things too, and here in these lives we've built for ourselves, here in these hard and glittering cities, none of this would seem real if it wasn't for you. — Emily St. John Mandel

No,' Dahlia said, 'because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You know what I mean?'

'No, please elaborate.'

'Okay, say you go into the break room,' she said, 'and a couple people you like are there, say someone's telling a funny story, you laugh a little, you feel included, everyone's so funny, you go back to your desk with a sort of, I don't know, I guess afterglow would be the word? You go back to your desk with an afterglow, but then by four or five o'clock the day's just turned into yet another day, and you go on like that, looking forward to five o'clock and then the weekend and then your two or three annual weeks of paid vacation time, day in day out, and that's what happens to your life. — Emily St. John Mandel

Cold rain, the sidewalk shining, the shhh of car tires on the wet street. Thinking about the terrible gulf of years between eighteen and fifty. — Emily St. John Mandel

No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No — Emily St. John Mandel

The claustrophobia of the forest. The first few trees visible before her, monochrome contrasts of black shadow and white moonlight, and beyond that an entire continent, wilderness uninterrupted from ocean to ocean with so few people left between the shores. — Emily St. John Mandel

Did this happen to all actors, this blurring of borders between performance and life? — Emily St. John Mandel

(The best advice her mother ever gave her: "Walk in like you own the place.") — Emily St. John Mandel

Some places, you pass through once and never return, because you can tell something's very wrong. Everyone's afraid, or it seems like some people have enough to eat and other people are starving, or you see pregnant eleven-year-olds and you know the place is either lawless or in the grip of something, a cult of some kind. — Emily St. John Mandel

Everything ends. I am not afraid. — Emily St. John Mandel

Do you remember when we were young and gorgeous? — Emily St. John Mandel

LATER THEY HAVE a house in the Hollywood Hills and a Pomeranian who shines like a little ghost when Miranda calls for her at night, a white smudge in the darkness at the end of the yard. There — Emily St. John Mandel

He was half-naked in the bed, lying like a starfish. After she got up he always liked to see how much of the bed he could sleep on at once. — Emily St. John Mandel

You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curbside, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you're in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze. There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth. There are dentists. She tried to imagine this life playing out somewhere at the present moment. Some parallel Kristen in an air-conditioned room, waking from an unsettling dream of walking through an empty landscape. — Emily St. John Mandel

She didn't remember what airplanes had looked like in flight but she did remember being inside one. The memory was sharper than most of her other memories from the time before, which she thought must mean that this had been very close to the end. She would have been seven or eight years old, and she'd gone to New York City with her mother, though she didn't remember why. She remembered flying back to Toronto at night, her mother drinking a glass of something with ice cubes that clinked and caught the light. She remembered the drink but not her mother's face. She'd pressed her forehead to the window and saw clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations linked by roads or alone. The beauty of it, the loneliness, the thought of all those people living out their lives, each porch light marking another house, another family. — Emily St. John Mandel

And here, all momentum left him. He could go no farther. The theater tickets had been intended as a romantic gesture, a let's-do-something-romantic-because-all-we-do-is-fight, and she'd abandoned him there, she'd left him onstage performing CPR on a dead actor and gone home, and now she wanted him to buy milk. Now that he'd stopped walking, Jeevan was cold. His toes were numb. All the magic of the storm had left him, and the happiness he'd felt a moment earlier was fading. — Emily St. John Mandel

I don't really remember what computer screens looked like, — Emily St. John Mandel

But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think - this will maybe sound weird - it's like the corporate world's full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I've had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia's no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts."

"I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite --"

"I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? 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. Dan's like that."

"You don't think he likes his job, then."

"Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realises it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially. — Emily St. John Mandel

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

People want what was best about the world. — Emily St. John Mandel

I was thinking earlier that to know this city you must first become penniless, because pennilessness (real pennilessness, I mean not having $2 for the subway) forces you to walk everywhere and you see the city best on foot. — Emily St. John Mandel

It was gorgeous and claustrophobic. I loved it and I always wanted to escape. — Emily St. John Mandel

She liked books, but the hours spent in small-town libraries were tedious, and she began the first list when she was eight or nine as a means of distraction. A list of names, eventually expanding to ten or twelve pages: Lilia, Gabriel, Anna, Michelle. In every town her name was different. — Emily St. John Mandel

I repent nothing, — Emily St. John Mandel

We have been lost for so long,' " she said, still quoting from that scene. She looked past him at the boy. The boy was staring at the gun in his hands. He was nodding, seemingly to himself. " 'We long only for the world we were born into.' — Emily St. John Mandel

Incredible in retrospect, all of it, but especially the parts having to do with travel and communications. This was how he arrived in this airport: he'd boarded a machine that transported him at high speed a mile above the surface of the earth. This was how he'd told Miranda Carroll of her ex-husband's death: he'd pressed a series of buttons on a device that had connected him within seconds to an instrument on the other side of the world, and Miranda - barefoot on a white sand beach with a shipping fleet shining before her in the dark - had pressed a button that had connected her via satellite to New York. These taken-for-granted miracles that had persisted all around them. — Emily St. John Mandel

The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it? — Emily St. John Mandel

what else might this awakening world contain? — Emily St. John Mandel

The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored. — Emily St. John Mandel

I've heard of a dozen prophets over the years. It's not an uncommon occupation. — Emily St. John Mandel

She is beautiful in a way that makes people forget what they were going to say when they look at her. — Emily St. John Mandel

She was astonished to see that the boy with the handgun was crying, his face wet. If she could only speak to August. We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid. — Emily St. John Mandel

There is too much world. — Emily St. John Mandel

Some people had mixed feelings about this - they'd obviously been abandoned here, everyone was hungry and 911 wasn't even operational; on the other hand, no one wants to be a thief - but then a business traveler named Max said, "Look, everyone just chill the fuck out, I'll cover it with my Amex. — Emily St. John Mandel

She moved over the surface of life the way figure skaters move, fast and choreographed, but she never broke through the ice, she never pierced the surface and descended into those awful beautiful waters, she was never submerged and she never learned to swim in those currents, these currents: all the shadows and light and splendorous horrors that make up the riptides of life on earth. — Emily St. John Mandel

You've actually just reminded me. I brought you something." She had finally assembled the first two issues of the Dr. Eleven comics, and had had a few copies printed at her own expense. She extracted two copies each of Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven and Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 2: The Pursuit from her handbag, and passed them across the table. — Emily St. John Mandel

There'd been an epidemic, the man had told him. Thirty people had died incandescent with fever, including the mayor. After this, a change in management, but the tuba's acquaintance had declined to elaborate on what he meant by this. He did say that twenty families had left since then, including Charlie and the sixth guitar and their baby. He said no one knew where they'd gone, and he'd told the tuba it was best not to ask. — Emily St. John Mandel

It just doesn't make sense," Elizabeth insisted. "Are we supposed to believe that civilization has just come to an end?"
"Well," Clark offered, "it was always a little fragile, wouldn't you say?" They were sitting together in the Skymiles Lounge, where Elizabeth and Tyler had set up camp.
"I don't know." Elizabeth spoke slowly, looking out at the tarmac. "I've been taking art history classes on and off for years, between projects. And of course art history is always pressed up close against non-art history, you see catastrophe after catastrophe, terrible things, all these moments when everyone must have thought the world was ending, but all those moments, they were all temporary. It always passes."
Clark was silent. He didn't think this would pass. — Emily St. John Mandel

But what made it bearable were the friendships, of course, the camaraderie and the music and the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy when it didn't matter who'd used the last of the rosin on their bow or who anyone had slept with, although someone - probably Sayid - had written "Sartre: Hell is other people" in pen inside one of the caravans, and someone else had scratched out "other people" and substituted "flutes." People — Emily St. John Mandel

There seemed to be a limitless number of objects in the world that had no practical use but that people wanted to preserve: cell phones with their delicate buttons, iPads, Tyler's Nintendo console, a selection of laptops. There were a number of impractical shoes, stilettos mostly, beautiful and strange. There were three car engines in a row, cleaned and polished, a motorcycle composed mostly of gleaming chrome. Traders brought things for Clark sometimes, objects of no real value that they knew he would like: magazines and newspapers, a stamp collection, coins. There were the passports or the driver's licenses or sometimes the credit cards of people who had lived at the airport and then died. Clark kept impeccable records. — Emily St. John Mandel

Are you asking if I believe in ghosts?"
"I don't know. Maybe. Yes."
"Of course not. Imagine how many there'd be."
"Yes," Kirsten said, "that's exactly it. — Emily St. John Mandel

The thing with the new world," the tuba had said once, "is it's just horrifically short on elegance. — Emily St. John Mandel

Not merely pretty, he decides. She is actually beautiful, but it's a subtle kind of beauty that takes some time to make itself apparent. — Emily St. John Mandel

then came a virus like an avenging angel, unsurvivable, a microbe that reduced the population of the fallen world by, what? There were no more statisticians by then, my angels, but shall we say ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent? — Emily St. John Mandel

She works on her never-ending project for hours at a time. In art school they talked about day jobs in tones of horror. She never would have imagined that her day job would be the calmest and least cluttered part of her life. — Emily St. John Mandel

He woke to quiet voices. This had been happening more and more lately, this nodding off unexpectedly, and it left him with an unsettled intimation of rehearsal. You fall asleep for short periods and then for longer periods and then forever. — Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven is the size of Earth's moon and was designed to resemble a planet, but it's a planet that can chart a course through galaxies and requires no sun. The station's artificial sky was damaged in the war, however, so on Station Eleven's surface it is always sunset or twilight or night. There was also damage to a number of vital systems involving Station Eleven's ocean levels, and the only land remaining is a series of islands that once were mountaintops. — Emily St. John Mandel

I believe when you're speaking English, you're allowed to refer to it as Prague. — Emily St. John Mandel

WHAT WAS LOST IN THE COLLAPSE: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. Twilight in the altered world, a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in a parking lot in the mysteriously named town of St. Deborah by the Water, Lake Michigan shining a half mile away. — Emily St. John Mandel

What a wonderful thing, to get paid for doing what you love," she says, and he agrees with this. — Emily St. John Mandel

Not quite a room, Jeevan thought now, looking around the stage. It was too transitory, all those doorways and dark spaces between wings, the missing ceiling. It was more like a terminal, he thought, a train station or an airport, everyone passing quickly through. — Emily St. John Mandel

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

but mostly his work just made him dislike houses. These enormous anchors that people tied to their lives. — Emily St. John Mandel

The boy turns to his parents and for an instant in the twilight he looks like his namesake, like Jeevan's brother. He comes to them, the moment already passed, and Jeevan lifts him into his arms to kiss the silk of his hair. Always these memories, barely submerged. — Emily St. John Mandel

So we ask them who they are, and their leader smiles at me and says, 'We are the light.' — Emily St. John Mandel

That's the thing I like about birthdays, they stay in one place. — Emily St. John Mandel

No, it's just, if everything happens for a reason," Elizabeth persists, "as personally, I believe that it does, then when I hear a story of how two people came together, it's like a piece of the plan is being revealed. — Emily St. John Mandel

Jeevan was crushed by a sudden certainty that this was it, that this illness that Hua was describing was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life. p20 — Emily St. John Mandel

It's the work itself that's important to me.' Miranda is aware of how pretentious this sounds, but is it still pretentious if it's true? — Emily St. John Mandel

This was during the final month of the era when it was possible to press a series of buttons on a telephone and speak with someone on the far side of the earth. — Emily St. John Mandel

Dieter walked a little ahead of the other actors, murmuring to his favourite horse. The horse, Bernstein, was missing half his tail, because the first cello had just restrung his bow last week. — Emily St. John Mandel

Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldn't remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had been cut from an automobile tire, three knives in her belt. — Emily St. John Mandel

What she aspired to was a kind of delirious perfection. What Lilia wanted was to travel, but not only that; she wanted to be a citizen of everywhere, free-wheeling and capable of instant flight. — Emily St. John Mandel

She slipped so easily into the folds of his life — Emily St. John Mandel

The stillness of the water, the horizon framed by other glass towers and miniature boats drifting in the distance. — Emily St. John Mandel

I wanted to be her north star. I wanted to be her map. I wanted to drink coffee with her in the cafes in the morning and do things, as you do, as she did, instead of just philosophizing about them and deconstructing their endless Russian-doll layers of meaning. I was alone before I met her. I wanted to disappear with her, and fold her into my life. I wanted to be her compass. I wanted to be her last speaker, her interpreter, her language. I wanted to be her translator, Zed, but none of the languages we knew were the same. — Emily St. John Mandel

Isn't indiscretion the very definition of weakness? — Emily St. John Mandel

The more we know about the former world, the better we'll understand what happened when it fell. — Emily St. John Mandel

Why, in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? The improbability of it. The sound of the engines faded, the airplane receding into blue until it was folded into silence and became a far-distant dot in the sky. — Emily St. John Mandel

Dr. Eleven: What was it like for you, at the end?
Captain Lonagan: It was exactly like waking up from a dream. — Emily St. John Mandel

He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret. — Emily St. John Mandel

A tired king at the end of his reign, perhaps not as sharp as he had been, contemplating a disastrous division of his kingdom. — Emily St. John Mandel

They'd performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings. — Emily St. John Mandel

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

Do you remember when you were young and gorgeous? Clark wanted to ask. Do you remember when everything seemed limitless? — Emily St. John Mandel

Being alive is a risk. — Emily St. John Mandel

she's come to understand that clothes are armor — Emily St. John Mandel

She was thinking about the container-ship fleet on the horizon. The crew out there wouldn't have been exposed to the flu. Too late to get to a ship herself now, but she smiled at the thought that there were people in this reeling world who were safe. — Emily St. John Mandel

To survive is not enough. To simply exist... is not enough!' - Roga Danar — Emily St. John Mandel

They wanted to expand the territory, so that spring they followed the Maumee River down past the ruins of Toledo, and then the Auglaize River into Ohio, and they eventually walked into the town where I lived. — Emily St. John Mandel

that people here see her as an eccentric, the actor's wife who inks mysterious cartoons that no one's ever laid eyes on - "My wife's very private about her work," Arthur says in interviews - and who doesn't drive and likes to go for long walks in a town where nobody walks anywhere and who has no friends except a Pomeranian, although does anyone really know this last part? She hopes not. Her friendlessness is never mentioned in gossip blogs, which she appreciates. She hopes she isn't as awkward to other people as she feels to herself. — Emily St. John Mandel

The corridor was silent. It was necessary to walk very slowly, her hand on the wall. A man was curled on his side near the elevators, shivering. She wanted to speak to him, but speaking would take too much strength, so she looked at him instead - I see you, I see you - and hoped this was enough. — Emily St. John Mandel

Because he had been sleepwalking, Clark realized, moving half-asleep through the motions of his life for a while now, years; not specifically unhappy, but when had he last found real joy in his work? When was the last time he'd been truly moved by anything? When had he last felt awe or inspiration? He wished he could somehow go — Emily St. John Mandel

Also because the two young women working the kiosk seemed profoundly unconcerned by what was unfolding on CNN, either that or they were extremely stoic or they hadn't noticed yet, so visiting them was like going back in time to the paradise of a half hour earlier, when he hadn't yet known that everything was coming undone. — Emily St. John Mandel

If you write literary fiction that's set partly in the future, you're apparently a sci-fi writer ... I think of it as being more of a story about what remains after we lose everything and the importance of art in our lives. — Emily St. John Mandel