Emily St. John Mandel Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

“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.

What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.

You know the phrase I keep thinking about?" a poet asked, on a different panel, at a festival in Copenhagen. "'The chickens are coming home to roost.' Because it's never good chickens. It's never 'You've been a good person and now your chickens are coming home to roost.' It's never good chickens. It's always bad chickens.

Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.

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.

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

“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.

If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness.

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.

She tried to keep this opinion to herself and occasionally succeeded.

The horse, Bernstein, was missing half his tail, because the first cello had just restrung his bow last week.