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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 |
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839f0b4
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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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eaefad6
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Eli left her there. In the kitchen he found the pomegranate he'd bought for her and quartered it quickly on a pale blue plate. He thought the contrast between the shades of the pomegranate and the blue might please her. Any one of a number of details can prevent a ship from sinking.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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5f238be
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She was unsettling. But sometimes there was something perfect about it.
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unsettling
perfect
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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ddeee79
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She was unmoored and her memories were eroding in the sunlight,
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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c8848cd
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by this point he's twenty-eight, time speeding up in a way that disconcerts him, the parties going too late and getting too sloppy, waiting in the ER on two separate occasions for news of friends who've OD'd on exotic combinations of alcohol and prescription medications, the same people at party after party, the sun rising on scenes of tedious debauchery, everyone looking a little undone.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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ef4528c
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You remembered." "Of course," Clark said. "That's one thing I like about birthdays, they stay in one place. Same spot on the calendar, year in, year out." "But the years keep going faster, have you noticed?"
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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ef986f6
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Adulthood's full of ghosts. . . . 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. . . . High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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510de1e
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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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Emily St. John Mandel |
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67a6776
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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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d18a3b0
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A life, remembered, is a series of photographs and disconnected short films:
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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c5eca9e
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Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1: Station Eleven
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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858ceb6
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Although actually when she thought about it, Annette said, the post-apocalyptic movies she'd seen had all involved zombies. "I'm just saying," she said, "it could be much worse."
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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bedaabf
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His only part in the story: to observe and remember the chain of events. Not all of us will be cast in the greatest dramas; someone has to remember them
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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e89d109
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probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially." What was it in this statement that made Clark want to weep? He was nodding, taking down as much as he could. "Do you think he'd describe himself as unhappy in his work?" "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 mea..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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a609a9b
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We're so lucky to be in this position, all of us who make our living as actors, and I find complaints about invasion of privacy to be disingenuous, frankly. I mean, let's be real here, we wanted to be famous, right?
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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fc0c7e6
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the broken-windows theory of urban-crime management, the way the appearance of dereliction can pave the way for more serious crimes.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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87f319e
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but she knows she'll never belong here no matter how hard she tries. These are not her people. She is marooned on a strange planet.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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f007cdf
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you. Come here soon. Michaela. If the whole business of life on earth had ever made sense to him, it ceased to at that moment. She unmoored him, her departure made him want to disappear, et cetera--but if the world was askew in the time after he met her, in the time after she left, the postcard spun it entirely from its axis. The day at the gallery passed like a dream.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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f949ef4
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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. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in th..
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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d47f117
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Sometimes a cult takes over, and those towns are the most dangerous. DIALLO: In what sense? RAYMONDE: In the sense that they're unpredictable. You can't argue with them, because they live by an entirely different logic.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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4dad8ef
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Trinity bomb test in
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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bb92ab0
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How could so many die so quickly? The numbers seemed impossible.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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c7eb303
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You don't know where you're going unless you know where you're going.
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not-knowing
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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f9c4eb6
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If nothing else, it's pleasant to consider the possibility.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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bc084c1
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I have walked all my life through this tarnished world.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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4080fd4
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The Georgia Flu was so efficient that there was almost no one left.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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29931f8
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What a terrible time that was," Clark said softly to an imaginary Robert, practicing for the future. "Awful," Imaginary Robert agreed. "Remember those days when you were in the airport, and I didn't know where you were?"
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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6c28a87
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did you just say you're famous for your discretion?
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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049b0c0
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He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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3426d25
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I like waitresses with tattoos. It implies the existene of a secret life.
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Emily St. John Mandel |
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7b4b70f
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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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2c64c67
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No one ever thinks they're awful, even people who really actually are.
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Emily St. John Mandel |