The Glass Hotel Quotes

“There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“Memories are always bent retrospectively to fit individual narratives”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“I'm no expert, but I remember reading somewhere, every time you retrieve a memory, that act of retrieval, it corrupts the memory a little bit. Maybe changes it a little.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“There’s an inherent pleasure in being unseen.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“Give me quiet, he thought, give me forests and ocean and no roads. Give me the walk to the village through the woods in summer, give me the sound of wind in cedar branches, give me mist rising over the water, give me the view of green branches from my bathtub in the mornings. Give me a place with no people in it, because I will never fully trust another person again.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“It’s possible to both know and not know something.’ ”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“She’d never believed in love at first sight but she did believe in recognition at first sight, she believed in understanding upon meeting someone for the first time that they were going to be important in her life, a sensation like recognizing a familiar face in an old photograph: in a sea of faces that mean nothing, one comes into focus. You.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“A revelation earned only in hindsight: beauty can have a corrosive effect on character. It is possible to coast for some years on no more than a few polished lines and a dazzling smile, and those years are formative.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“You know what I've learned about money? I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that's when I realized that money is its own country.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“(Idea for a ghost story: a woman gets old and falls out of time and realizes that she’s become invisible.)”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“It is possible to leave so much out of any given story.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“the problem with dropping out of the world is that the world moves on without you,”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“Imagining an alternate reality where there was no Iraq War, for example, or where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn’t been swiftly contained; an alternate world where the Georgia flu blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“I've always had a weakness for places where it seems like time slows down.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“Did I say I liked working with her? I loved working with her. I considered her a friend. You know how rare it is to work with someone who loves their life?”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“What does it mean to be a ghost, let alone to be there, or here? There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life—”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“I don’t know, it just started to seem a little claustrophobic, living in the same place with the same people I’d known since I was born.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“But does a person have to be either admirable or awful? Does life have to be so binary? Two things can be true at the same time, he told himself.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“It's just one future slipping away and being replaced by another.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“In their late thirties they'd decided not to have children, which at the time seemed like a sensible way to avoid unnecessary complications and heartbreak, and this decision had lent their lives a certain ease that he'd always appreciated, a sense of blissful unencumberance. But an encumbrance might also be thought of as an anchor, and what he'd found himself thinking lately was that he wouldn't mind being more anchored to this earth.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“grief can make anyone a little irrational in the moment.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“she believed in understanding upon meeting someone for the first time that they were going to be important in her life, a sensation like recognizing a familiar face in an old photograph: in a sea of faces that mean nothing, one comes into focus. You.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“A memory, but it's a memory so vivid that there's a feeling of time travel, of visiting the actual moment.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“Anyway hallucinations is the wrong word, it’s more like a creeping sense of unreality, a sense of collapsing borders, reality seeping into the counterlife and the counterlife seeping into memory.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“she knew she was a reasonably intelligent person, but there’s a difference between being intelligent and knowing what to do with your life, also a difference between knowing that a college degree might change your life and a willingness to actually commit to the terrifying weight of student loans,”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in, so much so that she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her,”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“There’s such happiness in a successful escape.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“Do you find yourself sort of secretly hoping that civilization collapses, Melissa said, just so that something will happen?”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel