Megan • Reading Books Like a Boss (book blog)

“But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think - this will maybe sound weird - it's like the corporate world's full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I've had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia's no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts."

"I'm sorry, I'm not sure I quite --"

"I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped. Dan's like that."

"You don't think he likes his job, then."

"Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realises it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can't fake a thought.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“Both fictions and memories are recalled and retold. They're both forms of stories. Stories are the way we learn. Stories are how we understand each other.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“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.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven