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But there are rare instances when you look at them and you see something so totally unfamiliar in that face that it's like looking at a stronger , and if we can be honest here, there's fear in that. (228)

Her use of the word "chaparral" is pleasing.

"I have lived my life in the ordered calm of the State, and I have always believed in its essential contract, which can be summarized as follows: The opposite of disorder is harmony. Peace is achieved through surveillance. Service is the surveillance department of the State. Harmony at any cost." (207)

Emily St. John Mandel is spinning 3 or 4 plates at the same time. This novel reminds the reader of Anthony Doerr's "Cloud Cuckoo Land". Only difference, in my mind, he spins 7 or 8 plates. Talented writer nonetheless.

"If you live long enough you become a migrant from another timeline. There's the world you learn to navigate as you enter adulthood, and then that world slips away from you by degrees, and after a while there's nothing left of it, but you're still here. That's what I mean."

"Sometimes it's clarifying to pose the question in reverse. What don't you want your life to be, Sebastian?" (149)

"What do you want?" He asked, after a while. The question unfurled into a dozen other questions that he didn't have to ask because they were all implicit--what are you doing here, what will become of you, etc--and I didn't tell him because I didn't know him well enough to try to express this, but what I wanted, actually, the thing I most longed for, was to get to live in a different kind of world."

"I wanted buildings constructed with an eye toward permanence. I wanted a place that wasn't overrun with warring militias."