222 Quotes by Emily St. John Mandel

Forever is the most dizzying word in the English language. The idea of staying in one place forever was like standing at the border of a foreign country, peering over the fence and trying to imagine what life might be like on the other side, and life on the other side was frankly unimaginable.

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.

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.

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.

But these thoughts broke apart in his head and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air. Finally whispering the same two words over and over: “Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking.

It is sometimes necessary to break everything.

I don’t think a camera will bring my mother back. “What I’m suggesting,” Caroline said softly, “is that the lens can function as a shield between you and the world, when the world’s just a little too much to bear. If you can’t stand to look at the world directly, maybe it’s possible to look at it through the viewfinder.

Simone had been in New York City for six months by now, and she thought that she was beginning to understand how a person could become very tired here. She’d seen them on the subway, the tired people, the people who’d worked too long and too hard, caught up in the machine, eyes closed on the evening trains.

Stop looking for me. I’m not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don’t want to go home.