Emily St. John Mandel Quotes

There occurred an incident that struck me at the time as some kind of supernatural event, but seems to me in retrospect to have been perhaps some kind of fit.

What is time travel if not a security problem?

Twenty-third Street wasn’t busy—a little early for the lunch crowd—but he kept getting trapped behind iPhone zombies, people half his age who wandered in a dream with their eyes fixed on their screens.

Everything offended Jessica, which is inevitable when you move through the world in search of offense.

She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn’t entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.

“My secret is, I hate people,” the woman said, very sincerely, and for the first time Mirella liked her.
“All people?”
“All except maybe like three,” she said.

I would rather do a dangerous job than a job that makes me comatose with boredom.

If definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life.

Isn’t that reality? Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?

I just want them to know that it happened for a reason."
"Look, Tyler, some things just happen." This close, the stillness of the ghost plane was overwhelming.
"But why did they die instead of us?" the boy asked, with an air of patiently reciting a well-rehearsed argument. His gaze was unblinking.
"Because they were exposed to a certain virus, and we weren't. You can look for reasons, and god knows a few people here have driven themselves half-crazy trying, but Tyler, that's all there is."
"What if we were saved for a different reason?"
"Saved?" Clark was remembering why he didn't talk to Tyler very often.
"Some people were saved. People like us."
"What do you mean, 'people like us'?"
"People who were good," Tyler said."People who weren't weak."
"Look, it's not a question of having been bad or...the people in there, in the Air Gradia jet, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Tesch seems to be someone who mistakes rudeness for intellectual rigor.

Miranda is aware of how pretentious this sounds, but is it still pretentious if it’s true?

This whole place is death. No, that’s unfair—this place isn’t death, this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn’t care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn’t even noticed him.

“Why would he marry a twelve-year-old?”
“He had a dream where God told him he was to repopulate the earth.”
“Of course he did,” the clarinet said. “Don’t they all have dreams like that?”
“Right, I always thought that was a prerequisite for being a prophet,” Sayid said.

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.