Quotes by Emily St. John Mandel

“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 scre...”

“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.”

“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 ch...”

“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 bo...”

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

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

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

“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...”

“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 is time travel if not a security problem?”

“Everything offended Jessica, which is inevitable when you move through the world in search of offense.”

“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 ‘Yo...”

“Isn’t that reality? Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?”

“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 genero...”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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...”

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