222 Quotes by Emily St. John Mandel

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.

What’s the point of doing all that work,” Tesch asks, “if no one sees it?” “It makes me happy. It’s peaceful, spending hours working on it. It doesn’t really matter to me if anyone else sees it.

He woke to quiet voices. This had been happening more and more lately, this nodding off unexpectedly, and it left him with an unsettled intimation of rehearsal. You fall asleep for short periods and then for longer periods and then forever.

The stillness of the water, the horizon framed by other glass towers and miniature boats drifting in the distance.

The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour, And for me, now as then, it is too much. There is too much world. – Czeslaw Milosz The Separate Notebooks.

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”.

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.

A life, remembered, is a series of photographs and disconnected short films.

He wanted nothing that he didn’t already have.