Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

“No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.”

First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.

She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.

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.