Emily St. John Mandel Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

“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.

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.

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

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.

“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.

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.

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

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.