Emily St. John Mandel Quotes

“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.

“Maybe you’re right. Turns out reality is more important than we thought,” Dion said.

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

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

Hell is other actors," Kirsten said. "Also ex-boyfriends.

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

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

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.

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.

They call themselves the light."
"What about it?"
"If you are the light," she said, "then your enemies are darkness, right?"
"I suppose."
"If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there's nothing that you cannot justify. There's nothing you can't survive, because there's nothing that you will not do.

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.

My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.

“I’m a man of my word,” Jeevan said. At that point in his directionless life he wasn’t sure if this was true or not, but it was nice to think that it might be.

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.

It’s possible that no one who didn’t grow up in a small place can understand how beautiful this is, how the anonymity of city life feels like freedom.