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53d0309
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At moments when other people could only stare, he wanted to be the one to step forward.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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22c0bbe
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There seemed to be a limitless number of objects in the world that had no practical use but that people wanted to preserve: cell phones with their delicate buttons, iPads, Tyler's Nintendo console, a selection of laptops. There were a number of impractical shoes, stilettos mostly, beautiful and strange. There were three car engines in a row, cleaned and polished, a motorcycle composed mostly of gleaming chrome. Traders brought things for Cl..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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0edf387
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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.
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sci-fi
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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f7e9dc3
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Garrett had had a wife and four-year-old twins in Halifax, but the last call he'd ever made was to his boss. The last words he'd spoken into a telephone were a bouquet of corporate cliches, seared horribly into memory. "Let's touch base with Nancy," he remembered saying, "and then we should reach out to Bob and circle back next week. I'll shoot Larry an email."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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97e6c13
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But what made It bearable were the friendships, of course, the camaraderie and the music and the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy when it didn't matter who'd used the last of the rosin on their bow or who anyone had slept with, although someone - probably Sayid - had written "Sartre: Hell is other people" in pen inside one of the caravans, and someone else had scratched out "other people' and substituted "flutes"."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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bbc1be6
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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. 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, ..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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6a93faa
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Being alive is a risk.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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e91fed3
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the more you remember, the more you've lost.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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b6b842c
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That evening they broke into the Mexican restaurant and cooked an enormous dinner of ground meat and tortilla chips and cheese with sauces splashed over it. Some people had mixed feelings about this--they'd obviously been abandoned here, everyone was hungry and 911 wasn't even operational; on the other hand, no one wants to be a thief--but then a business traveller named Max said, "Look, everyone just chill the fuck out, I'll cover it on my..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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b5232c7
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A tired king at the end of his reign, perhaps not as sharp as he had been, contemplating a disastrous division of his kingdom.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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6fdbf14
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He was the second violin and a secret poet, which is to say that no one in the Symphony knew he wrote poetry except Kirsten and the seventh guitar.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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2161f62
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But why me? We haven't spoken since the last divorce hearing." "You know where I'm from," he said, and she understood what he meant by this. Once we lived on an island in the ocean. Once we took the ferry to go to high school, and at night the sky was brilliant in the absence of all these city lights. Once we paddled canoes to the lighthouse to look at petroglyphs and fished for salmon and walked through deep forests, but all of this was co..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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28d4f59
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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 some sort of survival mechanism."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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1e84661
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AN INCOMPLETE LIST: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while u..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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b2ffec6
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so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts." "I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite--" "I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? 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."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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4c4f632
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She had once met an old man up near Kincardine who'd sworn that the murdered follow their killers to the grave, and she was thinking of this as they walked, the idea of dragging souls across the landscape like cans on a string.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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7eea92b
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Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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1ebbfdb
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Survival is insufficient
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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bff7ee8
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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..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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c395dc1
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SOMETIMES THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY thought that what they were doing was noble. There were moments around campfires when someone would say something invigorating about the importance of art, and everyone would find it easier to sleep that night.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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da94cc3
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Because he had 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 been truly moved by anything? When had he last felt awe or inspiration? He wished he could somehow go
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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50307a8
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But what made it bearable were the friendships, of course, the camaraderie and the music and the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy when it didn't matter who'd used the last of the rosin on their bow or who anyone had slept with, although someone--probably Sayid--had written "Sartre: Hell is other people" in pen inside one of the caravans, and someone else had scratched out "other people" and substituted "flutes." Peopl..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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544d887
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LATER THEY HAVE a house in the Hollywood Hills and a Pomeranian who shines like a little ghost when Miranda calls for her at night, a white smudge in the darkness at the end of the yard. There
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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5751545
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Adulthood's full of ghosts... High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.
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sleep
life
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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422fc81
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There are children on the island who go barefoot all summer and wear feathers in their hair, the Volkswagen vans in which their parents arrived in the '70s turning to rust in the forest. Every year there are approximately two hundred days of rain. There's a village of sorts by the ferry terminal: a general store with one gas pump, a health-food store, a real-estate office, an elementary school with sixty students, a community hall with two ..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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a46b471
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The painted forest collapsed into folds and fell soundlessly to the pavement.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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d2cfbef
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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. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of ori..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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504ec32
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Some places, you pass through once and never return, because you can tell something's very wrong. Everyone's afraid, or it seems like some people have enough to eat and other people are starving, or you see pregnant eleven-year-olds and you know the place is either lawless or in the grip of something, a cult of some kind.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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3d4f714
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I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? 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. Dan's like that." "You don't think he likes his job, then." "Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realizes it. You probably encounter people lik..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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7994d1f
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There was a reminder that the library was always seeking books, and that they paid in wine. The librarian, Francois Diallo, was also the newspaper's
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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4d7bdcb
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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.
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libraries
names
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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49e7651
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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 had done some things he wasn't proud of.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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0a9c26d
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Dear friends, I find myself immeasurably weary and I have gone to rest in the forest.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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33fdad3
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What she aspired to was a kind of delirious perfection. What Lilia wanted was to travel, but not only that; she wanted to be a citizen of everywhere, free-wheeling and capable of instant flight.
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travel
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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d01039c
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someone--probably Sayid--had written "Sartre: Hell is other people" in pen inside one of the caravans, and someone else had scratched out "other people" and substituted "flutes."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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e3806aa
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Because he had 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 been truly moved by anything? When had he last felt awe or inspiration?
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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df9823d
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Isn't indiscretion the very definition of weakness?
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wisdom
questions-in-life
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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f1d2b8f
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Nothing is over yet, she told herself. The cat's still inside.
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schrodinger-s-cat
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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865e896
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Well, it's nice that at least the celebrity gossip survived.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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f56f74c
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She started to explain her project to him again but the words stopped in her throat. 'You don't have to understand it,' she said. 'It's mine.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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654d41f
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This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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faea726
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This was during the final month of the era when it was possible to press a series of buttons on a telephone and speak with someone on the far side of the earth.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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f7d2c62
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Incredible in retrospect, all of it, but especially the parts having to do with travel and communications. This was how he arrived in this airport: he'd boarded a machine that transported him at high speed a mile above the surface of the earth. This was how he'd told Miranda Carroll of her ex-husband's death: he'd pressed a series of buttons on a device that had connected him within seconds to an instrument on the other side of the world, a..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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fac1384
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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. He couldn't tell if his headaches were caused by straining to see or by his anxiety a..
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Emily St. John Mandel |