Sea of Tranquility Quotes

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

“Is there an unease that's specific to the sense of an invisible bureaucracy in motion around you?”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“studied the history of work in university, and if there’s one historical constant over the centuries, it’s that no one especially wants to mess with HR.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

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

“Your cat’s from 1985,”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Well, people were throwing change at me, so I did at one point decide to just turn my hat upside down in front of me, so that all the change would at least land in one place.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

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

“What inspired Edwin to speak just then? He found himself dwelling on the matter years later, at war, in the terminal horror and boredom of the trenches. Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia. He likes sitting by his window.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin. “Evidence suggests they feel rather more oppressed by the British than by the heat,” Edwin said.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“He makes a careful inventory of his thoughts and decides that he isn’t unhappy. He just desires no further movement, for the time being. If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness. He spends his days walking on the beach, sketching, contemplating the sea from the porch, reading, playing”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Illness frightens us because it is chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“In a version of her life so distant that it now seemed like a fairytale.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“She put on her headphones so she could pretend not to hear if anyone spoke to her and willed herself toward invisibility.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“But all of this raises an interesting question,” Olive said. “What if it always is the end of the world?” She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“The thing with being away from her husband and daughter was that every hotel room was emptier than the one before.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

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

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

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

“. 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

“Can a house be haunted by failure?”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“—but on the other hand, isn’t that reality? Won’t most of us die in fairly anticlimactic ways, 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

“Well…yes,” she said. There was a knowledge-and-achievement gap the size of the solar system in that pause between words.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“It's a great life if you don't weaken.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“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

“the prime goal of every organism is self-protection.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“if definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

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

“He makes a careful inventory of his thoughts and decides that he isn’t unhappy. 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

“In those streets everyone moved faster than me, but what they didn’t know was that I had already moved too fast, too far, and wished to travel no further. I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility