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

— Emily St. John Mandel

All of this,' the prophet said, serene, 'all of our activities, Said, 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.

— Emily St. John Mandel

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.

— Emily St. John Mandel

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.

— Emily St. John Mandel

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.

— Emily St. John Mandel

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.

— Emily St. John Mandel

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.

— Emily St. John Mandel

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.

— Emily St. John Mandel

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

— Emily St. John Mandel

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 water aflame, the seascape bleeding into confused visions of Station Eleven, its extravagant sunsets the indigo sea. The lights of the fleet fading into morning, the ocean burning into sky.

— Emily St. John Mandel