Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

Date: 2023-04-02
| There’s rarely enough work to keep her occupied for more than
| an hour or two at a time, which means she can often spend entire
| afternoons sketching—
Chapter: Chapter 14


Date: 2023-04-03
| The first sentence of the assassin’s note rang true: we were not
| meant for this world. I returned to my city, to my shattered life and
| damaged home, to my loneliness, and tried to forget the sweetness
| of life on Earth.  Too long, also melodramatic. She erases it,
| and writes in soft pencil: I stood looking over my damaged home
| and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.
Chapter: Chapter 15


Date: 2023-04-03
| 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.
Chapter: Chapter 26


Date: 2023-04-03
| We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a
| lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There
| had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all
| of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to
| work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.
Chapter: Chapter 30


Date: 2023-04-03
| Gil had offered an uncertain reminiscence about an article he’d
| read once, something about how subatomic particles are constantly
| vanishing and reappearing, which meant, he supposed, that there’s
| someplace else to be, which he imagined might suggest that a person
| could theoretically be simultaneously present and not present,
| perhaps living out a shadow life in a parallel universe or two.
Chapter: Chapter 38


Date: 2023-04-03
| Lorca
Chapter: Chapter 39


Date: 2023-04-03
| “You look like an executive,” she said to herself in the
| mirror, and the thought that flitted behind this was You look like
| a stranger. She pushed it away.
Chapter: Chapter 39


Date: 2023-04-03
| Text: I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the
| sweetness of life on Earth.
Chapter: Chapter 39


Date: 2023-04-04
| 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 and its indigo sea. The lights of
| the fleet fading into morning, the ocean burning into sky.
Chapter: Chapter 41


Date: 2023-04-04
| “Let’s touch base with Nancy,” he remembered saying, “and
| then we should reach out to Bob and circle back next week. I’ll
| shoot Larry an email.”
Chapter: Chapter 47


Date: 2023-04-05
| I have walked all my life through this tarnished world,” the
| prophet said, “and I have seen such darkness, such shadows
| and horrors
Chapter: Chapter 50


Date: 2023-04-05
| “Whoever they are,” the prophet said, “they’ll arrive too
| late. You think you kneel before a man, but you kneel before the
| sunrise. We are the light moving over the surface of the waters,
| over the darkness of the undersea.” “The Undersea?” she
| whispered, but the prophet was no longer listening to her. A look
| of perfect serenity had come over his face and he was looking at
| her, no, through her, a smile on his lips.  “ ‘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.’ ”
Chapter: Chapter 50


Date: 2023-04-05
| that scene. She looked past him at the boy. The boy was
| staring at the gun in his hands. He was nodding, seemingly to
| himself. “ ‘We long only for the world we were born into
Chapter: Chapter 50


Date: 2023-04-05
| It was a page torn from a copy of Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No. 1:
| Station Eleven, the first page of Station Eleven she’d ever seen
| that hadn’t come from her copies of the books. The entire page
| devoted to a single image: Dr. Eleven kneels by the lifeless body
| of Captain Lonagan, his mentor and friend. They are in a room that
| Dr. Eleven sometimes uses as a meeting place, an office area with
| a glass wall that overlooks the City, the bridges and islands and
| boats. Dr. Eleven is distraught, a hand over his mouth. An associate
| is there too, a speech bubble floating over his head: “You were
| his second-in-command, Dr. Eleven. In his absence, you must lead
Chapter: Chapter 50


Date: 2023-04-05
| have walked all my life through this tarnished world
Chapter: Chapter 50


Date: 2023-04-05
| Tanya was studying an image of the Undersea, a heavily crosshatched
| room with mahogany arches from Station Eleven’s drowned
| forests. The room reminded Arthur of somewhere he’d been, but he
| couldn’t place it.
Chapter: Chapter 53


Date: 2023-04-05
| have a present for you.” He felt a little guilty as he handed
| her the Dr. Eleven comics, because after all Miranda had intended
| them for him, but he didn’t want the comics because he didn’t
| want possessions. He didn’t want anything except his son.
Chapter: Chapter 53


Date: 2023-04-05
| Later, he’d walked by the open bathroom door and heard her talking
| to herself as she removed her makeup. “I repent nothing,” he’d
| heard her say to her reflection in the mirror. He’d turned and
| walked away, but the words stayed with him. Years later in Toronto,
| on the plywood second story of the King Lear set, the words clarified
| the problem.
Chapter: Chapter 53


Date: 2023-04-05
| He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets
| crowding in around him like moths to a light.
Chapter: Chapter 53


Date: 2023-04-05
| IN DR. ELEVEN, VOL. 1, NO. 2: The Pursuit, Dr. Eleven is visited
| by the ghost of his mentor, Captain Lonagan, recently killed by an
| Undersea assassin. Miranda discarded fifteen versions of this image
| before she felt that she had the ghost exactly right, working hour
| upon hour, and years later, at the end, delirious on an empty beach
| on the coast of Malaysia with seabirds rising and plummeting through
| the air and a line of ships fading out on the horizon, this was the
| image she kept thinking of, drifting away from and then toward it and
| then slipping somehow through the frame: the captain is rendered in
| delicate watercolors, a translucent silhouette in the dim light of
| Dr. Eleven’s office, which is identical to the administrative area
| in Leon Prevant’s Toronto office suite, down to the two staplers
| on the desk. The difference is that Leon Prevant’s office had a
| view over the placid expanse of Lake Ontario, whereas Dr. Eleven’s
| office window looks out over the City, rocky islands and bridges
| arching over harbors. The Pomeranian, Luli, is curled asleep
| in a corner of the frame. Two patches of office are obscured by
| dialogue bubbles: Dr. Eleven: What was it like for you, at the end?
| Captain Lonagan: It was exactly like waking up from a dream
Chapter: Chapter 54


Date: 2023-04-05
| He pauses over a scene of a dinner party on Station Eleven. There’s
| something familiar about it. A woman with square-framed glasses
| is reminiscing about life on Earth: “I traveled the world before
| the war,” she says. “I spent some time in the Czech Republic,
| you know, in Praha …,” and tears come to his eyes because all
| at once he recognizes the dinner party, he was there, he remembers
| the Praha woman, her glasses and her pretension. The man sitting
| beside her bears a passing resemblance to Clark. The blond woman
| at the far end of the comic-book table is unmistakably Elizabeth
| Colton, and the man beyond her in the shadows looks a little like
| Arthur. Once Clark sat with all of them in Los Angeles, at a table
| under electric light. On the page, only Miranda is missing, her
| chair taken by Dr. Eleven.  In
Chapter: Chapter 55


Date: 2023-04-05
| nothing else, it’s pleasant to consider the possibility. He likes
| the thought of ships moving over the water, toward another world
| just out of sight.
Chapter: Chapter 55