Emily St. John Mandel quotes:

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

She works on her never-ending project for hours at a time. 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.

Do you remember when we were young and gorgeous?

She knows there are traps everywhere that can make her cry, she knows the way she dies a little every time someone asks her for change and she doesn't give it to them means that she's too soft for this world or perhaps just for this city, she feels so small here.

What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you've lost.

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.

First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that's not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.

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.

I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.

There are certain qualities of light that blur the years.

No one ever thinks they're awful, even people who really actually are. It's some sort of survival mechanism.

Love is like the lion's tooth.