Best 46 quotes of Emily St. John Mandel on MyQuotes

First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

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.

I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.

Love is like the lion’s tooth.

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.

There are certain qualities of light that blur the years.

Adulthood’s full of ghosts... High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.

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 take from that notion.

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.

A suggestion of a trapdoor waiting under every word.

Clark observa a actividade nocturna na pista, os aviões que estão parados à vinte anos, o reflexo da sua vela bruxuleante no vidro. Não tem esperança de ver um avião levantar voo novamente no seu tempo de vida, mas será possível que nalgum lugar haja navios a partirem? Se houver cidades com iluminação pública, se existem sinfonias e jornais, que mais pode conter este mundo que agora desperta? Talvez haja navios a içar velas neste preciso momento, a viajar em direcção a ele ou para longe dele, tripulados por marinheiro armados com mapas e conhecimento das estrelas, impulsionados pela necessidade, ou talvez simplesmente pela curiosidade: o que foi feito dos países do outro lado? É, pelo menos, agradável considerar essa possibilidade. Agrada-lhe a ideia de haver navios que se deslocam sobre as águas, em direcção a outro mundo fora do alcance da vista.

Dear V., I'm a terrible actor and this city is fucking freezing and I miss you. - A.

Há dinheiro, pedaços de papel que podem ser trocados por qualquer coisa: casas, barcos, dentes perfeitos.

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.

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 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.

...he was just another dead man on another road, answerless, the bearer of another unfathomable story about walking out of one world and into another.

I don’t believe in the perfectibility of the individual. What was it in this statement that made Clark want to weep?

If nothing else, it’s pleasant to consider the possibility.

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.

If you write literary fiction that’s set partly in the future, you’re apparently a sci-fi writer ... I think of it as being more of a story about what remains after we lose everything and the importance of art in our lives.

Isn't indiscretion the very definition of weakness?

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 they are just so disappointed ... They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped … High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.

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 see the city best on foot.

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 know what I mean?' 'No, please elaborate.' 'Okay, say you go into the break room,' she said, 'and a couple people you like are there, say someone's telling a funny story, you laugh a little, you feel included, everyone's so funny, you go back to your desk with a sort of, I don't know, I guess afterglow would be the word? You go back to your desk with an afterglow, but then by four or five o'clock the day's just turned into yet another day, and you go on like that, looking forward to five o'clock and then the weekend and then your two or three annual weeks of paid vacation time, day in day out, and that's what happens to your life.

Nothing is over yet, she told herself. The cat's still inside.

- OK, suponhamos que vai à copa - disse ela -, e duas pessoas que quem gosta estão lá, suponhamos que uma das pessoas está a contar uma história divertida, você ri-se um pouco, sente-se incluído, toda a gente tem tanta graça, e volta para a sua secretária com uma espécie de, não sei, brilho, mas depois às quatro ou cinco da tarde o dia transformou-se em apenas mais um, e continua assim, a ansiar pelas cinco da tarde e depois pelo fim de semana e depois pelas duas ou três semanas de férias pagas anuais, dia após dia, e é isso que acontece à sua vida.

One of the few things that August didn't know about her was that sometimes when she looked at her collection of pictures she tried to imagine and place herself in that other, shadow life. You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curb, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you're in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze. There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth. There are dentists. She tried to imagine this life playing out somewhere at the present moment. Some parallel Kirsten in an air-conditioned room, waking from an unsettling dream of walking through an empty landscape.

People want what was best about the world.

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 this world or perhaps just for this city, she feels so small here.

She liked books, but the hours spent in small-town libraries were tedious, and she began the first list when she was eight or nine as a means of distraction. A list of names, eventually expanding to ten or twelve pages: Lilia, Gabriel, Anna, Michelle. In every town her name was different.

She was unsettling. But sometimes there was something perfect about it.

So this is how it ends, she thought, when the call was over, and she was soothed by the banality of it.

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?

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? Perhaps soon humanity would simply flicker out, but Kirsten found this thought more peaceful than sad. So many species had appeared and later vanished from this earth; what was one more? How many people were even left now?

The claustrophobia of the forest. The first few trees visible before her, monochrome contrasts of black shadow and white moonlight, and beyond that an entire continent, wilderness uninterrupted from ocean to ocean with so few people left between the shores.

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

The more we know about the former world, the better we’ll understand what happened when it fell.

The thing with the new world,” the tuba had said once, “is it’s just horrifically short on elegance.

The wren goes to't

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'll call me back, but you will never call me first. And I think that's kind of a horrible thing, V., when you're supposed to be someone's friend. I always come to you. You always say you're my friend but you'll never come to me and I think I have to stop listening to your words, V., and take stock instead of your actions. My friend C. thinks my expectations of friendship are too high but I don't think he's right. Take care, V. I'll miss you.

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

Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldn’t 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 been cut from an automobile tire, three knives in her belt.

Viola had a harrowing story about riding a bicycle west out of the burnt-out ruins of a Connecticut suburb, aged fifteen, harboring vague notions of California but set upon by passersby long before she got there, grievously harmed, joining up with other half feral teenagers in a marauding gang and then slipping away from them, walking alone for a hundred miles, whispering French to herself because all the horror in her life had transpired in English and she thought switching languages might save her, wandering into a town through which the Symphony passed five years later.

You don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’re going.