The Singer's Gun Quotes

“Nothing is over yet, she told herself. The cat's still inside.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Singer's Gun

“A or B, two options present themselves, and you choose the one that seems best at the time.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Singer's Gun

“Kierkegaard’s”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Singer's Gun

“She wanted it to appear to any casual observer that she merely had a headache or was perhaps resting her eyes for a moment. The problem was more serious: she had forgotten how to read. This happened almost daily and she was used to it—she understood it to be a side effect of being unable to stand her job—but lately it had been happening earlier and earlier in the day. The mornings went quickly but the afternoons were deadly. Time slowed and expanded. She wanted to run. By four p.m. she sometimes had to correct the same paper three times. She reread words over and over again, she broke them down into individual syllables, she stared, but if you stare at any word for long enough it loses all meaning and goes abstract. She had had this job for some weeks now, ever since she’d been exiled without explanation from Anton Waker’s research department, and it was becoming gradually less tenable each day.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Singer's Gun

“someone must have pointed out to him that the organism he’d killed had been alive three thousand years before Christ, but can a man who thinks so small perceive anything so enormous?”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Singer's Gun

“He was unprepared for the sound. The city was all around him, and he was lost in the noise. There were trucks, horns, sirens from Lexington Avenue and from the cross streets, but behind these individual noises was the sound he stopped to listen to sometimes when he was jogging alone in Central Park at night. A sound formed of traffic and helicopters and distant airplanes, voices, car horns, conversations and music, sirens and shouting and the underground passage of trains, all combined into a susurration as constant and as endless as the sound of ocean waves.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Singer's Gun

“I still have these moments where I think, Come on, this can’t possibly be it. I cannot possibly be expected to do something this awful day in and day out until the day I die. It’s like a life sentence imposed in the absence of a crime.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Singer's Gun