Emily St. John Mandel

All of this,' the prophet said, serene, 'all of our activities, Sayid, you must understand this, all of your suffering, it's all part of a greater plan.''You'd be surprised at how little comfort I take from that notion.

To survive is not enough. To simply exist... is not enough!' - Roga Danar

What she aspired to was a kind of delirious perfection. What Lilia wanted was to travel, but not only that; she wanted to be a citizen of everywhere, free-wheeling and capable of instant flight.

This is going to seem bitter but I don't mean it that way, V., I'm just stating a fact here: you'll only ever call me if I call you first. Have you noticed that? If I call and leave a message you'll call me back, but you will never call me first.And I think that's kind of a horrible thing, V., when you're supposed to be someone's friend. I always come to you. You always say you're my friend but you'll never come to me and I think I have to stop listening to your words, V., and take stock instead of your actions. My friend C. thinks my expectations of friendship are too high but I don't think he's right. Take care, V. I'll miss you.

No,' Dahlia said, 'because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You know what I mean?''No, please elaborate.''Okay, say you go into the break room,' she said, 'and a couple people you like are there, say someone's telling a funny story, you laugh a little, you feel included, everyone's so funny, you go back to your desk with a sort of, I don't know, I guess afterglow would be the word? You go back to your desk with an afterglow, but then by four or five o'clock the day's just turned into yet another day, and you go on like that, looking forward to five o'clock and then the weekend and then your two or three annual weeks of paid vacation time, day in day out, and that's what happens to your life.

If nothing else, it's pleasant to consider the possibility. He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, toward another world just out of sight.

I was thinking earlier that to know this city you must first become penniless, because pennilessness (real pennilessness, I mean not having $2 for the subway) forces you to walk everywhere and you see the city best on foot.

Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldn__ remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had been cut from an automobile tire, three knives in her belt.

People want what was best about the world.

The more we know about the former world, the better we__l understand what happened when it fell.

Of course,_ the cabbie said, __ou don__ know where you__e going unless you know where you__e going.

She liked books, but the hours spent in small-town libraries were tedious, and she began the first list when she was eight or nine as a means of distraction. A list of names, eventually expanding to ten or twelve pages: Lilia, Gabriel, Anna, Michelle. In every town her name was different.

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.

If you write literary fiction that__ set partly in the future, you__e apparently a sci-fi writer ... I think of it as being more of a story about what remains after we lose everything and the importance of art in our lives.

He placed a pinch of snow on his tongue and thought of making snow ice cream with Frank and their mother when they were small boys - 'First you stir in the vanilla' - 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.

Miranda opened her eyes in time to see the sunrise. A wash of violent color, pink and streaks of brilliant orange, the container ships on the horizon suspended between the blaze of the sky and the water aflame, the seascape bleeding into confused visions of Station Eleven, its extravagant sunsets the its indigo sea. The lights of the fleet fading into morning, the ocean burning into sky.

The wren goes to't

The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored.