Sea of Tranquility Quotes

“What if one were to dissolve into the wilderness like salt into water. He wants to go home. For the first time, Edwin begins to worry about his sanity.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“It was difficult to be alive in the world”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Getting lost is death, he can see that. No, this whole place is death. No, that’s unfair—this place isn’t death, this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn’t care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn’t even noticed him. He feels somewhat deranged.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“There were several magnificent years of money and travel and then the lights went out.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Forgive me,” Olive said, “I fear there’s a problem with my translator bot. I thought you said he was kind to care for his own child.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“So we don’t own the building,” the director said, “but we hold a ten-thousand-year lease on the space.” “You’re right. That’s magnificent.” “Nineteenth-century hubris. Imagine thinking civilization would still exist in ten thousand years. But there’s more.” She leaned forward, paused for effect. “The lease is renewable.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“I don't know what I was thinking," said Edwin. "Actually, no, that's not true. I do know. I am absolutely certain there was not a single thought in my head. It was like a kind of void.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn’t entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“We knew it was coming,”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“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.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“You should have told me my cat was a time traveller.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“We sent an agent back to another century,” Zoey said, “but the agent fell in love with someone and didn’t want to come home, so she removed her own tracker, fed it to a cat, and then when we tried to forcibly return her to the present, the cat appeared in the travel chamber instead of her.” “Wait,” I said, “my cat’s from another century?” “Your cat’s from 1985,” she said. “What,” I said, at a loss for words.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“The things we see when we’re young, sometimes they don’t stay with us.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“There's a low-level, specific pain and having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“She had a window seat and was all but curled around her armrest, trying to stay as far from other people as possible. The surface of the moon rose out of blackness, bright from a distance and gray up close, the opaque bubbles of Colonies One, Two and Three gleaming in the sunlight.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“When you met your husband, what was your first clue that you loved him?” “Well,” Olive said, “I guess just a sense of recognition, if that makes sense. I remember the first time I saw him, I looked at him and I knew he’d be important in my life. Is that a clue, though?”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Look", Olive said, "the thing is, it's possible to be grateful for extraordinary circumstances and simultaneously long to be with the people you love.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“A sudden memory: drinking chai tea with”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“He just desires no further movement, for the time being. If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“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.” In”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“But doesn’t everything seem obvious in retrospect?”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“...because she remembered saying It seems like it's been fairly well contained, but here's an epidemiological question: if you're talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn't fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all? ... A virus is either contained or it isn't. It's a binary condition.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“If her parents loved her,” Meiying said, “it would have felt like the end of the world.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“We are living in a simulation, I told myself, as the trolley stopped a block from my apartment, but this fell so far short of, well, of the reality, for lack of a better word. I couldn’t convince myself. I didn’t believe it. There was a scheduled rainfall in—I glanced at my watch—two minutes. I stepped out of the trolley and walked very slowly, on purpose. I’ve always loved rain, and knowing that it isn’t coming from clouds doesn’t make me love it less.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“this. No family, no job, just a few simple pleasures and clean sheets to fall into at the end of the day, a regular allowance from home. A life of solitude could be a very pleasant thing. He”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Think of how holograms and virtual reality have evolved, even just in the past few years. If we can run fairly convincing simulations of reality now, think of what those simulations will be like in a century or two. The idea with the simulation hypothesis is, we can’t rule out the possibility that all of reality is a simulation.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“There was a scheduled rainfall in - I glanced at my watch - two minutes. I stepped out of the trolley and walked very slowly, on purpose. I've always loved, rain, and knowing that it isn't coming from clouds doesn't make me love it less.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“What if it always is the end of the world?” (”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility