Quotes by Emily St. John Mandel

“I was thinking earlier that to know this city you must first become penniless, because pennilessness (real pennilessness, I mean not having $2 for the subway) forces you to walk everywhere and you ...”

“If nothing else, it's pleasant to consider the possibility. He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, toward another world just out of sight.”

“People want what was best about the world.”

“Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldnt remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had b...”

“No,' Dahlia said, 'because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You...”

“She knows there are traps everywhere that can make her cry, she knows the way she dies a little every time someone asks her for change and she doesn't give it to them means that she's too soft for ...”

“What she aspired to was a kind of delirious perfection. What Lilia wanted was to travel, but not only that; she wanted to be a citizen of everywhere, free-wheeling and capable of instant flight.”

“This is going to seem bitter but I don't mean it that way, V., I'm just stating a fact here: you'll only ever call me if I call you first. Have you noticed that? If I call and leave a message you'l...”

“To survive is not enough. To simply exist... is not enough!' - Roga Danar”

“All of this,' the prophet said, serene, 'all of our activities, Sayid, you must understand this, all of your suffering, it's all part of a greater plan.''You'd be surprised at how little comfort I ...”

“Adulthoods full of ghosts... High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”

“The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?”

“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 s...”

“Are you asking if I believe in ghosts?""I don't know. Maybe. Yes.""Of course not. Imagine how many there'd be.""Yes," Kirsten said, "that's exactly it.”

“It's like the corporate world's full of ghosts maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and t...”

“Miranda opened her eyes in time to see the sunrise. A wash of violent color, pink and streaks of brilliant orange, the container ships on the horizon suspended between the blaze of the sky and the ...”

“The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored.”

“The wren goes to't”

“He placed a pinch of snow on his tongue and thought of making snow ice cream with Frank and their mother when they were small boys - 'First you stir in the vanilla' - Frank standing on a stool on h...”

“If you write literary fiction thats set partly in the future, youre apparently a sci-fi writer ... I think of it as being more of a story about what remains after we lose everything and the importa...”