Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

the childhood pleasure of being the first to leave footprints.

This was during the final month of the era when it was possible to press a series of buttons on a telephone and speak with someone on the far side of the earth.

Did I mention that?” “Did we not acknowledge you loudly enough the first six times you mentioned it?”

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

Thinking about the terrible gulf of years between eighteen and fifty.

The tattoo argument had lost all of its sting over the years and had become something like a familiar room where they met.

“We never travel without a destination,” Alexandra said. “If we’re ever, if you’re ever separated from the Symphony on the road, you make your way to the destination and wait.”

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

“Unsparing,” Clark said. “That could mean anything.” But probably nothing good, he decided. No one’s ever described as being unsparingly kind.

They were afraid of everyone who wasn’t them.

He had never felt so alive or so sad.

RAYMONDE: What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.

Those previous versions of herself were so distant now that remembering them was almost like remembering other people,

The memory had dimmed since she’d last retrieved it, imprecision creeping in.

Clark felt that there were limits to how early one should call anyone for any reason.

It was possible to comprehend the scope of the outbreak, but it wasn’t possible to comprehend what it meant.