Emily St. John Mandel - Station Eleven (2014)

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The horse, Bernstein, was missing half his tail, because the first cello had just restrung his bow last week.

Emily St. John Mandel
No one ever thinks they're awful, even people who really actually are. It's some sort of survival mechanism.

Emily St. John Mandel
First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that's not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.

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

Emily St. John Mandel
What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you've lost.

Emily St. John Mandel
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.

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

Emily St. John Mandel
Miranda is aware of how pretentious this sounds, but is it still pretentious if it's true?

Emily St. John Mandel
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.

Emily St. John Mandel
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.

Emily St. John Mandel
She tried to keep this opinion to herself and occasionally succeeded.

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 screens.

Emily St. John Mandel
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
Tesch seems to be someone who mistakes rudeness for intellectual rigor.

Emily St. John Mandel
Hell is other actors, Kirsten said. Also ex-boyfriends.

Emily St. John Mandel
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.

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
The journalist is beautiful in the manner of people who spend an immense amount of money on personal maintenance. She has professionally refined pores and a four-hundred-dollar haircut, impeccable makeup and tastefully polished nails. When she smiles, Arthur is distracted by the unnatural whiteness of her teeth, although he's been in Hollywood for years and should be used to it by now.

Emily St. John Mandel