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670e55c
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She loved details, and the world, and inevitably became lost in both. Violently beautiful sunsets could reduce her to tears. She was virtually incapacitated by fireflies.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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9c20ca7
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And here, all momentum left him. He could go no farther. The theater tickets had been intended as a romantic gesture, a let's-do-something-romantic-because-all-we-do-is-fight, and she'd abandoned him there, she'd left him onstage performing CPR on a dead actor and gone home, and now she wanted him to buy milk. Now that he'd stopped walking, Jeevan was cold. His toes were numb. All the magic of the storm had left him, and the happiness he'd ..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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7e4f295
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They are always waiting, the people of the Undersea. They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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4d26a21
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Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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1e9a6ef
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You know what bothered me about it? Everyone was supposedly committed to the pursuit of truth and beauty, or at least one of those things, but no one was actually doing anything about it, and it seemed all wrong to me. The inertia, I mean. The inertia made everything seem fraudulent. There we were, talking about art, but no one was doing anything except Lilia. She was taking pictures. She spoke four languages." "Five." "You're counting Ru..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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15a507f
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So this is how it ends, she thought, when the call was over, and she was soothed by the banality of it. You get a phone call in a foreign country, and just like that the man with whom you once thought you'd grow old has departed from this earth.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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3b857a0
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The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored.
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shakespeare
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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51bf9c8
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You can't argue with them, because they live by an entirely different logic. You come to a town where everyone's dressed all in white, for example. I'm thinking of a town we visited once just outside our usual territory, north of Kincardine, and then they tell you that they were saved from the Georgia Flu and survived the collapse because they're superior people and free from sin, and what can you say to that? It isn't logical. You can't ar..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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d7f26d3
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He was thinking of the book, and what Dahlia had said about sleepwalking, and a strange thought came to him: had Arthur seen that Clark was sleepwalking? Would this be in the letters to V.? Because he been sleepwalking, Clark realized, moving half-asleep through the motions of his life for a while now, years; not specifically unhappy, but when had he last found real joy in his work? When was the last time he'd truly been moved by anything..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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5ff309f
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Tesch seems to be someone who mistakes rudeness for intellectual rigor.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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9f08dfd
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What happens next?" Miranda asks. It's easier to talk to Elizabeth when they're sitting side by side, when she doesn't have to look at her. "I don't know." "You do know." "I wish I could tell you how sorry I am," Elizabeth says, "but you've already told me to stop apologizing." "It's just an awful thing to do." "I don't think I'm an awful person," Elizabeth says. "No one ever thinks they're awful, even people who really actually are. It's s..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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c8d9a3a
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There are thoughts of freedom and imminent escape. I could throw away almost everything, she thinks, and begin all over again. Station Eleven will be my constant.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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38e026a
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No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one's hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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08f8e5e
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It's not a hometown, actually, it's a home island. "It's the same size and shape as Manhattan," Arthur tells people at parties all his life, "except with a thousand people." Delano Island is between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia, a straight shot north from Los Angeles. The island is all temperate rain forest and rocky beaches, deer breaking into vegetable gardens and leaping in front of windshields, moss on low-hanging bran..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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d93e17a
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You told me you're trying to shed your possessions or something, right?" "Exactly. They're lovely, but I don't want more things."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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3a3a6da
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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.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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aa502c9
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Ah," Tesch says. "Very admirable of you. You know, it reminds me of a documentary I saw last month, a little Czech film about an outsider artist who refused to show her work during her lifetime. She lived in Praha, and--" "Oh," Clark says, "I believe when you're speaking English, you're allowed to refer to it as Prague." Tesch appears to have lost the power of speech."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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34d9caf
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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. Do you remember when we were young and gorgeous? Clark wanted to ask. Do you remember when everything seemed limitless?
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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c44b4b7
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It occurred to her that this was what being caught might be like. The white-hot flash of recognition and then her life blown open, a radioactive mirror in a wasteland, her secretive life torn asunder and scattered outward in disarray.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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104993f
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If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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4731688
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This one's my other favorite. 'He's successful in interfacing with clients we already have, but as for new clients, it's low-hanging fruit. He takes a high-altitude view, but he doesn't drill down to that level of granularity where we might actionize new opportunities.'" Clark winced. "I remember that one. I think I may have had a minor stroke in the office when he said that."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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bab43e1
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I wanted to be her north star. I wanted to be her map. I wanted to drink coffee with her in the cafes in the morning and do things, as you do, as she did, instead of just philosophizing about them and deconstructing their endless Russian-doll layers of meaning. I was alone before I met her. I wanted to disappear with her, and fold her into my life. I wanted to be her compass. I wanted to be her last speaker, her interpreter, her language. I..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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36bc547
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she's come to understand that clothes are armor
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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468400d
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It's an awful thing to be the target.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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7ed1fc6
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Do you remember when you were young and gorgeous? Clark wanted to ask. Do you remember when everything seemed limitless?
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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fb649ad
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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 Kristen found this thought more peaceful than sad. So many species had appeared and later vanished from this earth; what was one more?
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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0e2f0b1
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The stillness of the water, the horizon framed by other glass towers and miniature boats drifting in the distance.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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6a64371
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I am heartless, she thinks, but she knows even through her guilt that this isn't true. 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,
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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f3f4332
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The first sentence of the assassin's note rang true: we were not meant for this world. I returned to my city, to my shattered life and damaged home, to my loneliness, and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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ed36112
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that people here see her as an eccentric, the actor's wife who inks mysterious cartoons that no one's ever laid eyes on--"My wife's very private about her work," Arthur says in interviews--and who doesn't drive and likes to go for long walks in a town where nobody walks anywhere and who has no friends except a Pomeranian, although does anyone really know this last part? She hopes not. Her friendlessness is never mentioned in gossip blogs, w..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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465b23d
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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 t..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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a666d35
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This life was never ours," she whispers to the dog, who has been following her from room to room, and Luli wags her tail and stares at Miranda with wet brown eyes. "We were only ever borrowing it."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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90beda1
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Jeevan was crushed by a sudden certainty that this was it, that this illness that Hua was describing was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life. p20
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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b4b2dc2
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he had an idea--too sentimental to speak aloud and he knew none of his divorced friends would ever own up to it--that something must linger, a half-life of marriage, some sense memory of love even if obviously not the thing itself. He thought these people must mean something to one another, even if they didn't like one another anymore. Heller
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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ae03a02
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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.
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end-of-the-world
isolation
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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58a8333
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She likes Hollywood best at night, in the quiet, when it's all dark leaves and shadows and night-blooming flowers, the edges softened, gently lit streets curving up into the hills.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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4fcbe55
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The seventh guitar was a nervous person, because he was nearly blind. He'd been able to see reasonably well with an extremely thick pair of glasses, but he'd lost these six years ago and since then he'd lived in a confusing landscape distilled to pure color according to season--summer mostly green, winter mostly gray and white--in which blurred figures swam into view and then receded before he could figure out who they were.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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3e497a0
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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 ..
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frank-chaudhary
functional
jeevan-chaudhary
paraplegic
reuters
snow-cream
spinal-cord
the-fullness-of-time
vanilla
wondrous
designer
bullet
conflagration
pieces
dictator
patterns
libya
tongue
snow
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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9f786f6
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If the dreams of the last speaker of Chamicuro won't survive the passage into another language, then what else has been lost? What else that was expressible in that language cannot be said in another?
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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f01e7a5
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They acted because they loved acting, but also, let's be honest here, to be noticed. All they wanted was to be seen. I've been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they'll never truly die. I know that's a cliche but it happens to b..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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2656730
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I'm like a man in a wheelchair watching other people run. I can see what good acting is but I can't quite reach it but I'm so close sometimes, V. I'm really trying.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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90cde7d
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I believe when you're speaking English, you're allowed to refer to it as Prague.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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df22eb6
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She watched his gaze flicker over her suit, her gleaming shoes, and realized he was performing the same reconciliations she was, adjusting a mental image of a long-ago spouse to match the changed person sitting before him.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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597570d
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There were a number of impractical shoes, stilettos mostly, beautiful and strange.
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Emily St. John Mandel |