# Quote — Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven

> “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.”

- Author: [Emily St John Mandel](https://www.leafyquotes.com/emily-st-john-mandel.md)
- Book: [Station Eleven](https://www.leafyquotes.com/emily-st-john-mandel/station-eleven.md)
- Page: 259
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emily_St._John_Mandel#Station_Eleven_(2014)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/emily-st-john-mandel/station-eleven/i-just-want

## More from this book

> 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.

p. 191 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/emily-st-john-mandel/station-eleven/frank-standing-on-a-stool.md)

> 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.

p. 327 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/emily-st-john-mandel/station-eleven/he-found-he-was.md)

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

p. 49 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/emily-st-john-mandel/station-eleven/hell-is-other.md)