Emily St. John Mandel

"A fragment for my friend--If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you Silent, my starship suspended in night"

"But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think - this will maybe sound weird - it's like the corporate world's full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I've had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia's no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts. I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite --I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that. You don't think he likes his job, then. Correct, she said, but I don't think he even realises it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially."

"“A fragment for my friend--If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you Silent, my starship suspended in night”"

"Of course,” the cabbie said, “you don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’re going."

"The wren goes to't"

"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."

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

"People want what was best about the world."