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f04f04f
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There was the flu that exploded like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth and the shock of the collapse that followed, the first unspeakable years when everyone was traveling, before everyone caught on that there was no place they could walk to where life continued as it had before and settled wherever they could, clustered close together for safety in truck stops and former restaurants and old motels.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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c88ebf7
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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 completely unremarkable because everyone else we knew did these things too, and here in these lives we've built for ourselves, here in these ha..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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7b3117c
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He has no interest in comics. He doesn't understand the difference between serious graphic novels and Saturday-morning cartoons with wide-eyed tweetybirds and floppy-limbed cats.
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graphic-novels
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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6fd3e39
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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. Dan's like that." "You don't think he likes his job, then." "Correct," she said, "but I ..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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9fc50c8
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There'd been an epidemic, the man had told him. Thirty people had died incandescent with fever, including the mayor. After this, a change in management, but the tuba's acquaintance had declined to elaborate on what he meant by this. He did say that twenty families had left since then, including Charlie and the sixth guitar and their baby. He said no one knew where they'd gone, and he'd told the tuba it was best not to ask.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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a46960c
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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.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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cf4f6b8
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It occurred to Clark that he should call someone, actually everyone, that he should call everyone he'd ever loved and talk to them and tell them all the things that mattered, but it was apparently already too late for this, his phone displaying a message he'd never seen before: SYSTEM OVERLOAD EMERGENCY CALLS ONLY.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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19980f8
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I don't really remember what computer screens looked like,
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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f59852a
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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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e63e5d2
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Survival might be insufficient, she'd told Dieter in late-night arguments, but on the other hand, so was Shakespeare. He'd trotted out his usual arguments, about how Shakespeare had lived in a plague-ridden society with no electricity and so did the Traveling Symphony. But look, she'd told him, the difference was that they'd seen electricity, they'd seen everything, they'd watched a civilization collapse, and Shakespeare hadn't. In Shakespe..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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fc952e8
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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 actions new opportunities.' Clark winced. 'I remember that one. I think I may have had a minor stroke in the office when he said that.' 'It raises questions,' Garrett said. 'It certainly does.' 'There ar..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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82d0ccb
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he's got a terrible marriage and doesn't want to go home, and don't ask how I know that, everyone knows when you've got a terrible marriage, it's like having bad breath, you get close enough to a person and it's obvious.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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c001b1a
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Station Eleven is the size of Earth's moon and was designed to resemble a planet, but it's a planet that can chart a course through galaxies and requires no sun. The station's artificial sky was damaged in the war, however, so on Station Eleven's surface it is always sunset or twilight or night. There was also damage to a number of vital systems involving Station Eleven's ocean levels, and the only land remaining is a series of islands that..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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846e40c
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You've actually just reminded me. I brought you something." She had finally assembled the first two issues of the Dr. Eleven comics, and had had a few copies printed at her own expense. She extracted two copies each of Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven and Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 2: The Pursuit from her handbag, and passed them across the table."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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f4132b2
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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 traveler named Max said, "Look, everyone just chill the fuck out, I'll cover it with my Amex."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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a6525e2
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Because survival is insufficient,
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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ce541fc
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Dieter walked a little ahead of the other actors, murmuring to his favourite horse. The horse, Bernstein, was missing half his tail, because the first cello had just restrung his bow last week.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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e76cf79
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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."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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36cf2c9
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If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you Silent, my starship suspended in night
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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d3ca624
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He wished he could somehow go back and find the iPhone people whom he'd jostled on the sidewalk earlier, apologize to them - I'm sorry, I've just realized that I'm as minimally present in this world as you are, I had no right to judge -
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clark-thompson
iphone
iphone-people
jostled
judging
judging-people
minimally-present
no-right-to-judge
sidewalk
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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451b260
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A man was curled on his side near the elevators, shivering. She wanted to speak to him, but speaking would take too much strength, so she looked at him instead--I see you, I see you--and hoped this was enough.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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604b2fd
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It is sometimes necessary to break everything.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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165b686
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No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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8889660
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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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expectations
friends
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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918e623
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A or B, two options present themselves, and you choose the one that seems best at the time.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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03953b1
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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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a326b12
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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. At other times it seemed a difficult and dangerous way to survive and hardly worth it, especially at times when they had to camp between towns, when they were turned away at gunpoint from hostile plac..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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1d897eb
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He had decided before the accident not to chase them anymore, but the circumstances of the accident made him fear for Lilia's safety. he would never bring her in, not anymore; all he wanted now was to watch over her. Michaela had been reading his notes for years, but his notes were only part of it: the other part was the way he woke up at night in his bed in Montreal and knew where Lilia was, the way he could glance at a map of the United S..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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b3eb6fa
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He was half-naked in the bed, lying like a starfish. After she got up he always liked to see how much of the bed he could sleep on at once.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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a3bcbe5
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Sixty dollars later Jeevan was alone outside his brother's apartment door, the carts lined up down the corridor. Perhaps, he thought, he should have called ahead from the grocery store. It was one a.m. on a Thursday night, the corridor all closed doors and silence. "Jeevan," Frank said when he came to the door. "An unexpected pleasure." "I..." Jeevan didn't know how to explain himself, so he stepped back and gestured weakly at the carts ins..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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6ff532d
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Also because the two young women working the kiosk seemed profoundly unconcerned by what was unfolding on CNN, either that or they were extremely stoic or they hadn't noticed yet, so visiting them was like going back in time to the paradise of a half hour earlier, when he hadn't yet known that everything was coming undone.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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f102866
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but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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5583568
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In art school they talked about day jobs in tones of horror. She never would have imagined that her day job would be the calmest and least cluttered part of her life.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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b076dff
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Jeevan's understanding of disaster preparedness was based entirely on action movies, but on the other hand, he'd seen a lot of action movies. He
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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9379143
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Because we are always looking for the former world, before all the traces of the former world are gone.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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69f11e5
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Did I ever tell you about my last phone call?" Garrett asked. "Yes," Clark said gently. "I believe you did." 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."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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87b9148
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It's cold in Toronto but I like where I'm living.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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94e839d
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They swore at airport management, at the TSA, at the airlines, at their useless phones, furious because fury was the last defense against understanding what the news stations were reporting.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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0bbd5c2
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paper fell out of the book. It was a page torn from
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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1b7772b
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Don't think of that unspeakable decision, to keep the jet sealed rather than expose a packed airport to a fatal contagion. Don't think about what enforcing that decision may have required. Don't think about those last few hours on board. Snow
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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dcccc61
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A liquid movement below on the tarmac; a cat, hunting in the shadows.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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73bcbd9
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her. It was a lump of glass with a storm cloud trapped inside. In the lobby, the people gathered at the bar clinked their glasses together. "To Arthur," they said. They drank for a few more minutes and then went their separate ways in the storm. Of all of them there at the bar that night, the"
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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afc0666
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It's not looking promising for a quick end to the emergency," a newscaster said, understating the situation to a degree previously unmatched in the history of understatement,"
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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ff804e2
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You fall asleep for short periods and then for longer periods and then forever.
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Emily St. John Mandel |