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Last Night in Montreal QUOTES

Last Night in Montreal QUOTES

1 " What she aspired to was a kind of delirious perfection. What Lilia wanted was to travel, but not only that; she wanted to be a citizen of everywhere, free-wheeling and capable of instant flight. "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

2 " She liked books, but the hours spent in small-town libraries were tedious, and she began the first list when she was eight or nine as a means of distraction. A list of names, eventually expanding to ten or twelve pages: Lilia, Gabriel, Anna, Michelle. In every town her name was different. "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

3 " Forever is the most dizzying word in the English language. The idea of staying in one place forever was like standing at the border of a foreign country, peering over the fence and trying to imagine what life might be like on the other side, and life on the other side was frankly unimaginable. "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

4 " She slipped so easily into the folds of his life "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

5 " Michaela wasn't someone Lilia ever trusted, but there was a certain kinship; she shared Lilia's suspicion that the world might prove, in the end, to have been either a mirage or a particularly elaborate hoax. "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

6 " Stop looking for me. I'm not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don't want to go home. "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

7 " She moved over the surface of life the way figure skaters move, fast and choreographed, but she never broke through the ice, she never pierced the surface and descended into those awful beautiful waters, she was never submerged and she never learned to swim in those currents, these currents: all the shadows and light and splendorous horrors that make up the riptides of life on earth. "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

8 " She loved details, and the world, and inevitably became lost in both. Violently beautiful sunsets could reduce her to tears. She was virtually incapacitated by fireflies. "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

9 " It occurred to her that this was what being caught might be like. The white-hot flash of recognition and then her life blown open, a radioactive mirror in a wasteland, her secretive life torn asunder and scattered outward in disarray. "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

10 " I wanted to be her north star. I wanted to be her map. I wanted to drink coffee with her in the cafes in the morning and do things, as you do, as she did, instead of just philosophizing about them and deconstructing their endless Russian-doll layers of meaning. I was alone before I met her. I wanted to disappear with her, and fold her into my life. I wanted to be her compass. I wanted to be her last speaker, her interpreter, her language. I wanted to be her translator, Zed, but none of the languages we knew were the same. "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

11 " If the dreams of the last speaker of Chamicuro won't survive the passage into another language, then what else has been lost? What else that was expressible in that language cannot be said in another? "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

12 " He had decided before the accident not to chase them anymore, but the circumstances of the accident made him fear for Lilia's safety. he would never bring her in, not anymore; all he wanted now was to watch over her. Michaela had been reading his notes for years, but his notes were only part of it: the other part was the way he woke up at night in his bed in Montreal and knew where Lilia was, the way he could glance at a map of the United Staes and realize with absolute, inexplicable certainty that she was in West Virginia, the way he tried to ignore his terrifying clairvoyance and forget where she was and couldn't, the way he knew where she was but had to keep driving south to check, the horror of always being right: he saw her face in the crowd on Sunset Boulevard, he stepped into a hardware store in St. Louis at the moment she stepped out of the deli across the street, he stood on a corner in a run-down neighborhood in Chicago and watched her emerge from an apartment building down the block. After each sighting he returned north more depleted, more frightened, less intact. "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

13 " His only part in the story: to observe and remember the chain of events. Not all of us will be cast in the greatest dramas. Someone has to remember them. "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

14 " Montreal was less than two inches to the north. "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

15 " It was beginning to dawn on her that she had traveled so long, so perfectly, that it was difficult to conceive of another kind of life. It was difficult to imagine stopping, but stopping as imminent. "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

16 " Eli left her there. In the kitchen he found the pomegranate he’d bought for her and quartered it quickly on a pale blue plate. He thought the contrast between the shades of the pomegranate and the blue might please her. Any one of a number of details can prevent a ship from sinking. "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

17 " She was unsettling. But sometimes there was something perfect about it. "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

18 " She was unmoored and her memories were eroding in the sunlight, "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

19 " His only part in the story: to observe and remember the chain of events. Not all of us will be cast in the greatest dramas; someone has to remember them "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal

20 " you. Come here soon. Michaela. If the whole business of life on earth had ever made sense to him, it ceased to at that moment. She unmoored him, her departure made him want to disappear, et cetera—but if the world was askew in the time after he met her, in the time after she left, the postcard spun it entirely from its axis. The day at the gallery passed like a dream. "

― Emily St. John Mandel , Last Night in Montreal