Emily St John Mandel

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.

He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.

Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.

Isn’t that reality? Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?

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.

“Hell is other actors,” Kirsten said. “Also ex-boyfriends.”

“I’m a man of my word,” Jeevan said. At that point in his directionless life he wasn’t sure if this was true or not, but it was nice to think that it might be.

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.

Tesch seems to be someone who mistakes rudeness for intellectual rigor.

The horse, Bernstein, was missing half his tail, because the first cello had just restrung his bow last week.

“I just want them to know that it happened for a reason.”

“Look, Tyler, some things just happen.” This close, the stillness of the ghost plane was overwhelming.

“But why did they die instead of us?” the boy asked, with an air of patiently reciting a well-rehearsed argument. His gaze was unblinking.

“Because they were exposed to a certain virus, and we weren’t. You can look for reasons, and god knows a few people here have driven themselves half-crazy trying, but Tyler, that’s all there is.”

“What if we were saved for a different reason?”

“Saved?” Clark was remembering why he didn’t talk to Tyler very often.

“Some people were saved. People like us.”

“What do you mean, ‘people like us’?”

“People who were good,” Tyler said.”People who weren’t weak.”

“Look, it’s not a question of having been bad or...the people in there, in the Air Gradia jet, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

What is time travel if not a security problem?