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f4542e3
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Do you remember when we were young and gorgeous?
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young
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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40bbfb8
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She slipped so easily into the folds of his life
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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b62a7b1
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We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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55b38cd
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Michaela wasn't someone Lilia ever trusted, but there was a certain kinship; she shared Lilia's suspicion that the world might prove, in the end, to have been either a mirage or a particularly elaborate hoax.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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fd1610e
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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 ..
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truth
p-163
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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5ee01b1
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I repent nothing,
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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389d630
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No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help an..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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e4a26d0
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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. Lif..
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parallel-universe
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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0356cd9
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The disorientation of meeting one's sagging contemporaries, memories of a younger face crashing into the reality of jowls, under-eye pouches, unexpected lines, and then the terrible realization that one probably looks just as old as they do.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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80f0a38
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The boy turns to his parents and for an instant in the twilight he looks like his namesake, like Jeevan's brother. He comes to them, the moment already passed, and Jeevan lifts him into his arms to kiss the silk of his hair. Always these memories, barely submerged.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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75555a3
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See, that illustrates the whole problem," Dieter said. "The best Shakespearean actress in the whole territory, and her favourite line of text is from ."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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0e74390
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Stop looking for me. I'm not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don't want to go home.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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c3c9f72
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High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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1f0c9c2
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She is beautiful in a way that makes people forget what they were going to say when they look at her.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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e49e3e9
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Did this happen to all actors, this blurring of borders between performance and life?
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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d943b5b
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He closed the fridge door, made his last breakfast - scrambled eggs - and showered, dressed, combed his hair, left for the theater an hour early so he'd have time to linger with the newspaper over his second-to-last coffee at his favorite coffee place, all of the small details that comprise a morning, a life.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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f48497f
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She moved over the surface of life the way figure skaters move, fast and choreographed, but she never broke through the ice, she never pierced the surface and descended into those awful beautiful waters, she was never submerged and she never learned to swim in those currents, these currents: all the shadows and light and splendorous horrors that make up the riptides of life on earth.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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ddd9036
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Toward the end of his second decade in the airport, Clark was thinking about how lucky he'd been. Not just the mere fact of survival, which was of course remarkable in and of itself, but to have seen one world end and another begin.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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cd73a4b
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Dear V., I'm a terrible actor and this city is fucking freezing and I miss you. - A.
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dear-v
station-eleven
actor
freezing
arthur
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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0ee12f6
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There was a new heaven and a new earth," the archer whispered. She saw the look on August's face just afterward and realized that the gunman had been his first--he'd had the colossal good fortune to have made it to Year Twenty without killing anyone--and if she weren't so tired, if it didn't take all of her strength to keep breathing in the face of Sayid's terrible news, she could have told him what she knew: it is possible to survive this ..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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c31fb9b
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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 its indigo sea. The lights of the fleet fading into morning, the ocean burning into sky.
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shakespeare
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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4e2c6cc
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It isn't possible," she said. "But there it is. Look again." In the distance, pinpricks of light arranged into a grid. There, plainly visible on the side of a hill some miles distant: a town, or a village, whose streets were lit up with electricity."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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fd49959
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But the trouble, is she doesn't really care. There was a time when this conversation would have reduced her to tears, but now she swivels in her chair to look out at the lake and thinks about moving trucks. She could call in sick to work, pack up her things, and be gone in a few hours. It is sometimes necessary to break everything.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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ce0b313
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She was astonished to see that the boy with the handgun was crying, his face wet. If she could only speak to August. We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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45b9f97
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Those previous versions of herself were so distant now that remembering them was almost like remembering other people, acquaintances, young women whom she'd known a long time ago, and she felt such compassion for them. "I regret nothing," she told her reflection in the ladies' room mirror, and believed it."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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1725b14
|
Is it possible that somewhere there are ships setting out? If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain? Perhaps vessels are setting out even now, traveling toward or away from him, steered by sailors armed with maps and knowledge of the stars, driven by need or perhaps simply by curiosity; whatever became of the countries on the other side? If nothing ..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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f492591
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This was something he adored about her, the way she let things go so easily. What a pleasant state of affairs, he'd been thinking lately, to be with a woman who didn't hold a grudge.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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b5d6747
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She was thinking about the container-ship fleet on the horizon. The crew out there wouldn't have been exposed to the flu. Too late to get to a ship herself now, but she smiled at the thought that there were people in this reeling world who were safe.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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60826fc
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We have been lost for so long,' " she said, still quoting from that scene. She looked past him at the boy. The boy was staring at the gun in his hands. He was nodding, seemingly to himself. " 'We long only for the world we were born into.' "
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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5314134
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Survival might be insufficient, she'd told Dieter in late-night arguments, but on the other hand, so was Shakespeare.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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08bae65
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Love is like the lion's tooth.
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love
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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55c6ae7
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If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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04772e3
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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."
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ghosts
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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112a759
|
The night sky was brighter than it had been. On the clearest nights the stars were a cloud of light across the breadth of the sky, extravagant in their multitudes . . . The era of light pollution had come to an end. The increasing brilliance meant the grid was failing, darkness pooling over the earth. I was here for the end of electricity. The thought sent shivers up Clark's spine.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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5169bca
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It just doesn't make sense," Elizabeth insisted. "Are we supposed to believe that civilization has just come to an end?" "Well," Clark offered, "it was always a little fragile, wouldn't you say?" They were sitting together in the Skymiles Lounge, where Elizabeth and Tyler had set up camp. "I don't know." Elizabeth spoke slowly, looking out at the tarmac. "I've been taking art history classes on and off for years, between projects. And of co..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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fdf81f9
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only the dishonorable leave when things get difficult.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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24e78bf
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I have walked all my life through this tarnished world. After she walked out of Toronto with her brother, after that first unremembered year, her brother had been plagued by nightmares. "The road," he'd always said, when she shook him awake and asked what he'd been dreaming of. He'd said, "I hope you never remember it."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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abf05e0
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When you think of how the world's changed in your lifetime, what do you think about?" "I think of killing." Her gaze was steady. "Really? Why?" "Have you ever had to do it?" Francois sighed. He didn't like to think about it. "I was surprised in the woods once." "I've been surprised too." It was evening, and Francois had lit a candle in the library. It stood in the middle of a plastic tub, for safety. The candlelight softened the scar on Kir..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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925a0e9
|
Kolase einai e apousia ton anthropon pou lakhtaras
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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5d148c5
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AT FIRST THE PEOPLE in the Severn City Airport counted time as though they were only temporarily stranded. This was difficult to explain to young people in the following decades, but in all fairness, the entire history of being stranded in airports up to that point was also a history of eventually becoming unstranded, of boarding a plane and flying away. At first it seemed inevitable that the National Guard would roll in at any moment with ..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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c71ce6b
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She didn't remember what airplanes had looked like in flight but she did remember being inside one. The memory was sharper than most of her other memories from the time before, which she thought must mean that this had been very close to the end. She would have been seven or eight years old, and she'd gone to New York City with her mother, though she didn't remember why. She remembered flying back to Toronto at night, her mother drinking a ..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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eb7b1d6
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There was a school here now, in Concourse C. Like educated children everywhere, the children in the airport school memorized abstractions: the airplanes outside once flew through the air. You could use an airplane to travel to the other side of the world, but--the schoolteacher was a man who'd had frequent-flyer status on two airlines--when you were on an airplane you had to turn off your electronic devices before takeoff and landing, devic..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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28e1f14
|
On two separate occasions he's told people in Los Angeles that he's from Canada and they've asked about igloos. An allegedly well-educated New Yorker once listened carefully to his explanation of where he's from--southwestern British Columbia, an island between Vancouver Island and the mainland--and then asked, apparently in all seriousness, if this means he grew up near Maine.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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9615e8b
|
Miranda," he said. "How long has it been?" This seemed to her a silly question. She'd assumed, she realized, that everyone remembers the date of their divorce, the same way everyone remembers their wedding date. "Eleven years," she said."
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Emily St. John Mandel |