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6 pages, Audiobook
First published April 5, 2022
“Isn’t that why we’re here? To leave a mark on wilderness?”
“I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
"I think you'd want to visit all those points in time," Zoey said. “You’d want to speak with the letter writer in 1912, the video artist in 2019 or 2020, and the novelist in 2203.”
"Pandemics don't approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It's disorienting. The pandemic is far away, and then it's all around you with seemingly no intermediate step."
"What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself."
“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world"
“Sometimes you don't know you're going to throw a grenade until you've already pulled the pin.”
“This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.”
"You write a book with a fictional tattoo and then the tattoo becomes real in the world and after that almost anything seems possible. She'd seen five of those tattoos, but that didn't make it less extraordinary, seeing the way fiction can bleed into the world and leave a mark on someone's skin."
"Is this the Promised End" – Shakespeare, King Lear
"August said that given an infinite number of parallel universes there had to be one where there had been no pandemic …… or one where they’d been a pandemic, but the virus had a subtly different genetic structure, some miniscule variance that rendered it survivable, in any case a universe in which civilization hadn’t been so brutally interrupted" - Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven
“hallucinations is the wrong word, it’s more like a creeping sense of unreality, a sense of collapsing borders, reality seeping into the counterlife and the counterlife seeping into memory" – Emily St John Mandel, Glass Hotel
“Pandemics don't approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It's disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it's all around you with seemingly no intermediate step.”
“I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
…
“What are you working on these days? Are you able to work?”
“I’m writing this crazy sci-fi thing,” Olive said.
“Interesting. Can you tell me about it?”
“I don’t know much about it myself, to be honest. I don’t even know if it’s a novel or a novella. It’s actually kind of deranged.”
“I suppose anything written this year is likely to be deranged,” the journalist said, and Olive decided she liked her.
“So I’m guessing I’m not the first to ask you what it’s like to be the author of a pandemic novel during a pandemic,” another journalist said.
“You might not be the very first.”
“What are you working on these days? Are you able to work?”
“I’m writing this crazy sci-fi thing,” Olive said.
“Interesting. Can you tell me about it?”
“I don’t know much about it myself, to be honest. I don’t even know if it’s a novel or a novella. It’s actually kind of deranged.”
“I suppose anything written this year is likely to be deranged,” the journalist said, and Olive decided she liked her.
“I was just trying to write an interesting book,” Olive said. “There’s no message.” “Are you sure?” the interviewer asked.