Emily St. John Mandel Quotes
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I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.
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There are certain qualities of light that blur the years.
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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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We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid.
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A fragment for my friend-- If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you Silent, my starship suspended in night.
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What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.
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I've been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they'll never truly die. I know that's a cliché but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They're all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that's not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.
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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. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.
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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.
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A life, remembered, is a series of photographs and disconnected short films.
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Love is like the lion’s tooth.
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The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?
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First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.
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Hell is the absence of the people you long for.
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They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.
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No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.
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It was gorgeous and claustrophobic. I loved it and I always wanted to escape.
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All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.