Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,’ ”

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.

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.”

“Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”