Memory
'I’ve been thinking about immortality lately. … They're all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.' (p187)
'I can't remember the year we spent on the road, and I think that means I can't remember the worst of it. But my point is, doesn't it seem to you that the people who have the hardest time in this—this current era, whatever you want to call it, the world after the Georgia Flu—doesn't it seem like the people who struggle the most with it are the people who remember the old world clearly?' (p195)
'"Well, it's nice that at least the celebrity gossip survived."' (p201)
'When it came down to it, François had realized, all of the Symphony's stories were the same, in two variations. Everyone else died, I walked, I found the Symphony. Or, I was very young when it happened, I was born after it happened, I have no memories or few memories of any other way of living, and I have been walking all my life. ' (p266)
'She had once met an old man up near Kincardine who'd sworn that the murdered follow their killers to the grave, and she was thinking of this as they walked, the idea of dragging souls across the landscape like cans on a string.' (p297)
Humanity
‘People want what was best about the world.' (p38)
'...arguing to distract themselves from their terrible fear.' (p119)
'The girl who needed Effexor was very sick by then. Withdrawal, she said. No one in the airport had the drug she needed. A raiding party went through every room, the administrative forces and the TSA holding cell, everyone’s desk drawers, and then they went outside and broke into the dozen or so cars abandoned in the parking lot, pawed through glove boxes and trunks. They found some useful items in their searches, extra pairs of shoes and some warm clothes and such, but on the pharmaceutical front they uncovered only painkillers and antacids and a mysterious bottle of pills that someone thought might be for stomach ulcers. In the meantime the girl lay across a bench, shivering and drenched in sweat, and she said her head sparked with electricity every time she moved.' (p242)
Beauty
'The Wendy’s was a low square building with the look of having been slapped together from a kit in an architectural careless era, but it had a beautiful front door. It was a replacement, solid wood, and someone had taken the trouble to carve a row of flowers along the side the carved handle. (p50)
'WHAT WAS LOST IN THE COLLAPSE: almost everything almost everyone but there is still such beauty' (p 57)
'a jagged scar on her cheek-bone half-erased by candlelight.' (p57)
'She (Kirsten) never feels more alive than at these moments' (when she’s performing) (p57)
'a sense of having own very high and landed incompletely, her soul pulling upward out of her chest.' (p59)
'beautiful respite from our daily cares' (p59)
‘It (the paperweight) was of no practical use whatsoever. Nothing but dead weight in the bag but she found it beautiful.’ (p66)
'Eleanor was showing Olivia how to make a daisy chain' (p130) (Beauty, nature, art)
'What the symphony was doing, what they were always doing, was trying to cast a spell, and costume helped; the lives they brushed up against were work-worn and difficult, people who spent all their time engaged in the tasks of survival.' (p151)
'The thing with the New World,' the tuber had said once, 'is it's just horrifically short on elegance.' (p151) and now snow was falling all around him, shining in the lights. He thought it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.' (Arthur when dying).
'.. and Kirsten, teary eyed and breathless, a few days shy of her eighth birthday, gazed at the object and thought it was the most beautiful, the most
wonderful, the strangest thing anyone had ever given her. It was a lump of glass with a storm cloud trapped inside.'
'It’s possible that no one who didn’t grow up in a small place can understand how beautiful this is, how the anonymity of city life feels like freedom.'
'...a year passed before she invented the beautiful wreckage of Station Eleven'
'Too late to get to a ship herself now, but she smiled at the thought that there were people in this reeling world who were safe. 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'.
Faith and Fate
"The flu," the prophet said, "the great cleansing that we suffered twenty years ago, that flu was our flood. The light we carry within us is the ark that carried Noah and his people over the face of the terrible waters, and I submit that we were saved"—his voice was rising—"not only to bring the light, to spread the light, but to be the light. We were saved because we are the light. We are the pure." (p60)
“I think this is happening because it was supposed to happen." Elizabeth speaks very softly.
"I'd prefer not to think that I'm following a script," Miranda says.' (p106)
Morality
'If you are the Light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify.' (p139)
Hope
'For a whole decade after the pandemic, I kept looking at the sky' (p134)
Chaos vs Order
'My people and I,’ he said, ‘when we speak of the light, we speak of order. This is a place of order. People with chaos in their hearts cannot abide here.' (p61)
'The paperweight qas a smooth lump og glass with storm clouds in it...'(p68)
‘Clark walked the length of the airport, restless, and was stunned to see that the security checkpoints were unmanned. He walked through and back three or four times, just because he could. He thought it would be liberating but all he felt was fear.’(p238)
'Miranda thinks of the places she might go now that
Los Angeles is over, and what surprises her is that the first place
that comes to mind is Neptune Logistics. She misses the order of the
place, the utter manageability of her job there, the cool air of Leon
Prevant’s office suite, the calm of the lake.'
Death vs Survival
'All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient. ' (p58)
'Being alive is a risk.' (p60)
'... the Symphony's stories were the same, in two variations. Everyone else died, I walked, I found the Symphony. Or, I was very young when it happened, I was born after it happened, I have no memories or few memories of any other way of living...' (p266)
'Jeevan taped plastic over all of the air ducts in the apartment and wondered if this was enough, if the virus could still reach them either through or perhaps somehow around the edges of the tape. He rigged Frank’s bath towels over the windows to prevent stray light from escaping at night, and pushed Frank’s dresser in front of the door. People knocked sometimes, and when they did Jeevan and Frank fell silent. They were afraid of everyone who wasn’t them. Twice someone tried to break in, scratching around the lock with some metal tool while Frank and Jeevan waited in an agony of stillness, but the deadbolt held. Days slipped past and the news went on and on until it began to seem abstract, a horror movie that wouldn’t end.'
“There’s still a world out there,” Jeevan said, “outside this apartment.”
“I think there’s just survival out there, Jeevan. I think you should go out there and try to survive.”
“I can’t just leave you.”
“I’ll leave first,” Frank said. “I’ve given this some thought.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, but he knew what Frank meant.
Technology
'None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended.' (p199)
'No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room.' (p32)
'...the point was that he was looking for the Internet. A few of the younger Symphony members had felt a little thrill when he’d said this, remembered the stories they’d been told about WiFi and the impossible-to-imagine Cloud, wondered if the Internet might still be out there somehow, invisible pinpricks of light suspended in the air around them.' (p38)
'In Traverse City Kirsten had stared at the This webpage is not available message on the screen (39) she tried to imagine and place herself in that other, shadow life. You walk into a room and ɻip a switch and the room ɹlls with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curb, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place. When you’re in danger, you call for the police. Hot water pours from faucets. Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone. All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze. There is money, slips of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth. There are dentists. She tried to imagine this life playing out somewhere at the present moment. Some parallel Kirsten in an air-conditioned room, waking from an unsettling dream of walking through an empty landscape.' (p201)
'In the fall of Year Fifteen, something remarkable happened. A trader came through with a newspaper.' (p262)
Civilisation
'Civilization in Year Twenty was an archipelago of small towns. These towns had fought of ferals, buried their neighbors, lived and died and suffered together in the blood-drenched years just after the collapse' (p48)
'She’d pressed her forehead to the window and saw clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations linked by roads or alone. The beauty of it, the loneliness, the thought of all those people living out their lives, each porch light marking another house, another family.' (p 135)
'In the distance, pinpricks of light arranged into a grid. There, plainly visible on the side of a hill some miles distant: a town, or a village, whose streets were lit up with electricity.' (p311)
'“Help you?” he asked. His tone wasn’t unfriendly, and this was the pleasure of being alive in Year Twenty, this calmer age. For the first ten or twelve years after the collapse, he would have been much more likely to shoot them on sight.'(p145)
'They'd performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings.' (p38)
'On silent afternoons in his brother's apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. 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.' (p178)