Station Eleven Quotes

People want what was best about the world. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

There are thoughts of freedom and imminent escape. I could throw away almost everything, she thinks, and begin all over again. Station Eleven will be my constant. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven asks that question, then it asks another: What would you then try ~ Anonymous

Miranda opened her eyes in time to see the sunrise. A wash of violent color, pink and streaks of brilliant orange, the container ships on the horizon suspended between the blaze of the sky and the water aflame, the seascape bleeding into confused visions of Station Eleven, its extravagant sunsets the its indigo sea. The lights of the fleet fading into morning, the ocean burning into sky. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

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, ========== Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel) ~ Anonymous

Dear V.,
I'm a terrible actor and this city is fucking freezing and I miss you.
- A. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

We long only to go home,' " Kirsten said. This was from the first issue, Station Eleven. A face-off between Dr. Eleven and an adversary from the Undersea. " 'We dream of sunlight, we dream of walking on earth.' ~ Emily St. John Mandel

Viola had a harrowing story about riding a bicycle west out of the burnt-out ruins of a Connecticut suburb, aged fifteen, harboring vague notions of California but set upon by passersby long before she got there, grievously harmed, joining up with other half feral teenagers in a marauding gang and then slipping away from them, walking alone for a hundred miles, whispering French to herself because all the horror in her life had transpired in English and she thought switching languages might save her, wandering into a town through which the Symphony passed five years later. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

She never feels more alive than at these moments. When onstage she fears nothing. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

he inadvertently opened the door to a storeroom on the station and found it full of aircrew uniforms on hangers. He thought they must be replacement issue until he looked more closely and saw the brevets and stripes and ribbon medals and realized they had come off the bodies of the dead and injured. The empty uniforms would have provided a poetic image if he hadn't more or less relinquished poetry by then. ~ Kate Atkinson

Anyone who has ridden the subway twice a day to earn their bread knows how it goes: When you board, you exhibit the same persona you use with your colleagues and acquaintances. You've carried it through the turnstile and past the sliding doors, so that your fellow passengers can tell who you are - cocky or cautious, amorous or indifferent, loaded or on the dole. But you find yourself a seat and the train gets under way; it comes to one station and then another; people get off and others get on. And under the influence of the cradlelike rocking of the train, your carefully crafted persona begins to slip away. The super-ego dissolves as your mind begins to wander aimlessly over your cares and your dreams; or better yet, it drifts into ambient hypnosis, where even cares and dreams recede and the peaceful silence of the cosmos pervades. ~ Amor Towles

I want to see the Parthenon by moonlight.'

I had my way. They floodlight it now, to great advantage I am told, but it was not so then, and since it was late in the year there were few tourists. My companions were all intelligent men, including my own husband, and they had the sense to stay mute. I suppose, being a woman, I confuse beauty with sentiment, but, as I looked on the Parthenon for the first time in my life, I found myself crying. It had never happened to me before. Your sunset weepers I despise. It was not full moon, or anywhere near it. The half circle put me in mind of the labrys, the Cretan double axe, and the pillars were the most ghostly in consequence. What a shock for the modern aesthete, I thought when my crying was done, if he could see the ruddy glow of colour, the painted eyes, the garish lips, the orange-reds and blues that were there once, and Athene herself a giantess on her pedestal touched by the rising sun. Even in those distant times the exigencies of a state religion had brought their own traffic, the buying and selling of doves, of trinkets: to find himself, a man had to go to the woods, to the hills.

"Come on," said Stephen. "It's beautiful and stark, if you like, but so is St. Pancras station at 4 A.M. It depends on your association of ideas."

We crammed into Burns's small car, and went back to our hotel. ("The Chamois") ~ Daphne Du Maurier

You know, the eleven million people living in the shadows, I believe, they're already American citizens ... These people are just waiting, waiting for a chance to contribute fully. And by that standard alone eleven million undocumented aliens are already Americans in my view. ~ Joe Biden

The anthropologist must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair on the veranda of the missionary compound, Government station, or planter's bungalow, where, armed with pencil and notebook and at times with a whisky and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from informants ... He must go out into the villages, and see the natives at work in gardens, on the beach, in the jungle; he must sail with them to distant sandbanks and to foreign tribes. ~ Bronislaw Malinowski

Swan dive down eleven stories high
Hold your breath until you see the light
You can sink to the bottom of the sea
Just don't go without me ~ The Civil Wars

Whatever your station or position in life, there is always room for improvement, enhancement, and perfection. I say this with a great sense of humility. Regardless of what you are enjoying at the moment, the Lord says that he has something
better for you! No matter what you have achieved, attained, or accomplished
in this world, there are more challenges and blessings ahead. God says that you have stayed long enough on this mountain. It is time to press forward to take more territories and receive more trophies. ~ Pedro Okoro

At daybreak on the first day, thousands of Cambodians are already calmly waiting outside my polling station. They squat on the ground, silent and patient. We didn't expect this at all. We thought they would fail to understand how democracy works. We thought they would be afraid of the Khmer Rouge. We thought they would passively accept their fate. We were wrong. ~ Heidi Postlewait

The morphlings from District 6 are in the camouflage station, painting each other's faces with bright pink swirls. ~ Suzanne Collins

Believe me, my children have more stamina than a power station. ~ Robbie Coltrane

He was, he realized, comforted by her presence. They didn't need to talk. They didn't even need to touch (although he wasn't about to let go just then). Simply put, he was a happier man - and quite possibly a better man - when she was near.
He buried his face in her hair, inhaling her scent, smelling . . .
Smelling . . .
He drew back. "Would you care for a bath?"
Her face turned an instant scarlet. "Oh, no," she moaned, the words muffled into the hand she'd clapped over her mouth. "It was so filthy in jail, and I was forced to sleep on the ground, and - "
"Don't tell me any more," he said.
"But - "
"Please."
If he heard more he might have to kill someone. As long as there had been no permanent damage, he didn't want to know the details.
"I think," he said, the first hint of a smile tugging at the left corner of his mouth, "that you should take a bath."
"Right." She nodded as she rose to her feet. "I'll go straight to your mother's - "
"Here."
"Here?"
The smile spread to the right corner of his mouth. "Here."
"But we told your mother - "
"That you'd be home by nine."
"I think she said seven."
"Did she? Funny, I heard nine."
"Benedict . . ."
He took her hand and pulled her toward the door. "Seven sounds an awful lot like nine."
"Benedict . . ."
"Actually, it sounds even more like eleven."
"Benedict!"
He deposited her right by the door. "Sta ~ Julia Quinn

What is a Gallagher Girl?" Liz asked.

She looked nervously down at the papers in her hand even though I knew for a fact she had memorized every word.

"When I was eleven I thought I knew the answer to that question. That was when the recruiters came to see me. They showed me brochures and told me they were impressed by my test scores and asked if I was ready to be challenged. And I said yes. Because that was what a Gallagher Girl was to me then, a student at the toughest school in the world."

She took a deep breath and talked on.

"What is a Gallagher Girl?" Liz asked again. "When I was thirteen I thought I knew the answer to that question. That was when Dr. Fibs allowed me to start doing my own experiments in the lab. I could go anywhere - make anything. Do anything my mind could dream up. Because I was a Gallagher Girl. And, to me, that meant I was the future."

Liz took another deep breath.

"What is a Gallagher Girl?" This time, when Liz asked it, her voice cracked. "When I was seventeen I stood on a dark street in Washington, D.C., and watched one Gallagher Girl literally jump in front of a bullet to save the life of another. I saw a group of women gather around a girl whom they had never met, telling the world that if any harm was to come to their sister, it had to go through them first."

Liz straightened. She no longer had to look down at her paper as she said, "What is a Gallagher Girl? I'm eight ~ Ally Carter

Drug and alcohol addiction almost killed me. I was a grave substance misuser in my teens. I started drinking at ten, smoking at eleven and by the time I attended high school aged twelve, I was regularly smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol on weekends. I was a full-blown alcoholic at thirteen. Tragically, I had my stomach pumped at fourteen and although I promised my family I would never drink again, I started less than two weeks later. I was completely hooked on alcohol. ~ Christopher Dines

Add to this occasional journeys, ministers' meetings, etc., and you will rather wonder that I have any time, than that I have so little. I am not my own, nor would I choose for myself. Let God employ me where he thinks fit, and give me patience and discretion to fill up my station to his honour and glory. ~ William Carey

Chapter Eleven: In Which I Interview Every Man Who Refused to Walk Through a Door I Held Open for Them Before Transition and Inform Them that They Are Retroactively Gay Now ~ Daniel Mallory Ortberg

There are different kinds of predators. There are the kinds who target the weak. And there are those with more of a Dexter vibe who don't lose sleep if a child abuser has a hard time on the way to the station. ~ Jonathan Maberry

Wuthering being a significant, provincial adjective descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. ~ Emily Bronte

It was a nightmare. Have you ever thrown a party and tried to get EXACTLY three dozen specifically qualified people to attend? Even if they RSVP, half of them never show up, right? And if enough people don't show up, you can't throw the party. So you have to recruit random people at the last minute who you've never met before to fill up the roster. And they turn out to be greedy eleven-year-olds from Estonia, who you're FORCED to keep around in order to limp through the evening's festivities, and . . . yeah. Just typing all that out gave me stress flashbacks. ~ Felicia Day

Blues
Elizabeth Alexander, 1962

I am lazy, the laziest
girl in the world. I sleep during
the day when I want to, 'til
my face is creased and swollen,
'til my lips are dry and hot. I
eat as I please: cookies and milk
after lunch, butter and sour cream
on my baked potato, foods that
slothful people eat, that turn
yellow and opaque beneath the skin.
Sometimes come dinnertime Sunday
I am still in my nightgown, the one
with the lace trim listing because
I have not mended it. Many days
I do not exercise, only
consider it, then rub my curdy
belly and lie down. Even
my poems are lazy. I use
syllabics instead of iambs,
prefer slant to the gong of full rhyme,
write briefly while others go
for pages. And yesterday,
for example, I did not work at all!
I got in my car and I drove
to factory outlet stores, purchased
stockings and panties and socks
with my father's money.

To think, in childhood I missed only
one day of school per year. I went
to ballet class four days a week
at four-forty-five and on
Saturdays, beginning always
with plie, ending with curtsy.
To think, I knew only industry,
the industry of my race
and of immigrants, the radio
tuned always to the station
that said, Line up your summer
job months in advance. Work hard
and do not shame your family,
who worke ~ Elizabeth Alexander

The relative importance of the white and gray matter is often misunderstood. Were it not for the manifold connection of the nerve cells in the cortex by the tens of millions of fibres which make up the under-estimated white matter, such a brain would be useless as a telephone or telegraph station with all the interconnecting wires destroyed. ~ Edward Anthony Spitzka

researchers analyzed data on more than six thousand children in Hong Kong, where smoking is not confined to those in lower economic brackets and where most smokers are men. The children were assessed when they were seven years old and again when they were eleven. Those whose fathers smoked when the mothers were pregnant were more likely to be overweight or obese. It was the first evidence supporting the idea that childhood obesity could be affected by a mother's exposure to her husband's smoking while she was pregnant. ~ Paul Raeburn

My characters tend, if wounded, to be emotionally resourceful. Often they're in that way station between when loss happens and when it can be fully comprehended. In the meantime they're fighting to get something back, and occasionally they prevail in surprising ways. ~ Tom Barbash

Among other things, the catechism said: "Ill treatment of animals bears witness to a cruel and godless heart." The boy recited, "A hundred and eleven treatment of animals bears witness to a cruel and godless heart. ~ Halldor Laxness

... imagine that the earth - four thousand six hundred million years old - [were] a forty-six-year-old woman ... . It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman's life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old ... when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five - just eight months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman's life ... . It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought ... that the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge - was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. ~ Arundhati Roy

The professor swiveled. "Exactly the question! By a trick of physics, the water didn't fill the foundation but instead managed to cut a separate course uphill! And in answer to your unasked question, yes! The barn was located on a ley line."
"That was the very question I was about to ask," Ronan said.
"Ronan," Blue said, "don't be such a shitbag."
Gansey caught a corner of Adam's laugh in the rearview mirror as he pulled into a parking spot at a bedraggled gas station. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Netherton was watching the intricate texture of her bustier, which resembled a microminiature model of some Victorian cast-iron station roof, its countless tiny panes filmed as by the coal smoke of fingerling locomotives, yet flexing as she breathed and spoke. ~ William Gibson

All the food we eat, whether Brussels sprouts or pork bellies, has been modified by mankind. Genetic engineering is only one particularly powerful way to do what we have been doing for eleven thousand years. ~ Michael Specter

And with that, he began walking at a rapid clip toward the Sixtieth Street station. Several members of the crowd I'd just pushed my way through came over to help me up, and one rather gallant gentleman, who was eighty if he was a day, tottered a few steps after Simon, shouting and shaking a fist in the air. ~ Rysa Walker

What music do you like?" he asked between calls.

"Cheery, chirpy pop."

Wincing, he pulled up a station that delivered exactly that. "You owe me."

"Come on" - she turned in her seat to face him once more - "it's not that bad."

"I'm sorry? I can't hear you past the sugar blocking my eardrums. ~ Nalini Singh

This is the BBC in London. You will now hear a statement from the Prime Minister." "I am speaking to you from the Cabinet room, Ten Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note, stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o'clock, that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now, that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently, this country is at war with Germany. ~ Jeffrey Archer

On either side of them the essence of honky tonk beach resort had now enclosed them: gas stations, fried clam stands, Dairy Treets, motels painted in feverish pastel colors, mini golf.

Larry was drawn two painful ways by these things. Part of him clamored at their sad and blatant ugliness and at the ugliness of the minds that had turned this section of a magnificent, savage coastline into one long highway amusement park for families in station wagons. But there was a more subtle, deeper part of him that whispered of the people who had filled these places and this road during other summers. Ladies in sunhats and shorts too tight for their large behinds. College boys in red and black striped rugby shirts. Girls in beach shifts and thong sandals. Small screaming children with ice cream spread over their faces. They were American people, and there was a kind of dirty, compelling romance about them whenever they were in groups never mind if the group was in an Aspen ski lodge or performing their prosaic/ arcane rites of summer along Route 1 in Maine. And now all these Americans were gone. ~ Stephen King

I think the crux of the matter was that if we were going to become partners in, for example, the International Space Station, we had to gain the respect of a country like the United States and particularly its space organization, NASA. ~ Marc Garneau

I could hardly breathe, watching her, and didn't even notice it was beginning to rain. I was just mesmerized by her. All eleven trillion cells of her. ~ Matt Haig

Do you remember the long orphanage of the train stations
We crossed cities that turn-tabled all day
And vomited at night the sunshine of the day ("The Voyager") ~ Pierre Albert-Birot