Emily St. John Mandel Quotes

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

Frank 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.

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.

What is time travel if not a security problem?

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.

The journalist is beautiful in the manner of people who spend an immense amount of money on personal maintenance. She has professionally refined pores and a four-hundred-dollar haircut, impeccable makeup and tastefully polished nails. When she smiles, Arthur is distracted by the unnatural whiteness of her teeth, although he’s been in Hollywood for years and should be used to it by now.

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

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

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

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.

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

“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.

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

But all of this raises an interesting question," Olive said. "What if it always is the end of the world?"
She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. "Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world," Olive said, "as a continuous and never-ending process.

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.