Emily St. John Mandel quotes
The journalist is beautiful in the manner of people who spend an immense amount of money on personal maintenance. She has professionally refined pores and a four-hundred-dollar haircut, impeccable makeup and tastefully polished nails. When she smiles, Arthur is distracted by the unnatural whiteness of her teeth, although he's been in Hollywood for years and should be used to it by now.
Emily St. John Mandel
Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together.
Emily St. John Mandel
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.
Emily St. John Mandel
I just want them to know that it happened for a reason.”
"Look, Tyler, some things just happen.” This close, the stillness of the ghost plane was overwhelming.
"But why did they die instead of us?” the boy asked, with an air of patiently reciting a well-rehearsed argument. His gaze was unblinking.
"Because they were exposed to a certain virus, and we weren't. You can look for reasons, and god knows a few people here have driven themselves half-crazy trying, but Tyler, that's all there is.”
"What if we were saved for a different reason?”
"Saved?” Clark was remembering why he didn't talk to Tyler very often.
"Some people were saved. People like us.”
"What do you mean, ‘people like us'?”
"People who were good,” Tyler said.”People who weren't weak.
Emily St. John Mandel