Station Eleven Quotes

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

Survival is insufficient.

First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.

A fragment for my friend-- If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you Silent, my starship suspended in night

What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.

They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.

No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.

I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.

It was gorgeous and claustrophobic. I loved it and I always wanted to escape.

The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?

Dr. Eleven: What was it like for you, at the end? Captain Lonagan: It was exactly like waking up from a dream.

She had never entirely let go of the notion that if she reached far enough with her thoughts she might find someone waiting, that if two people were to cast their thoughts outward at the same moment they might somehow meet in the middle.

We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid.

But these thoughts broke apart in his head and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air.

She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.

A life, remembered, is a series of photographs and disconnected short films.

If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.

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. No more avatars.

He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.

The thing with the new world,” the tuba had said once, “is it’s just horrifically short on elegance.

What’s the point of doing all that work,” Tesch asks, “if no one sees it?” “It makes me happy. It’s peaceful, spending hours working on it. It doesn’t really matter to me if anyone else sees it.

There are certain qualities of light that blur the years.

I'm just curious, how'd you get into this line of work?" "Gradually, and then suddenly

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.

The house is silent now and she feels like a stranger here. “This life was never ours,” she whispers to the dog, who has been following her from room to room, and Luli wags her tail and stares at Miranda with wet brown eyes. “We were only ever borrowing it.

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.’ 

Because survival is insufficient.

I've been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they'll never truly die. I know that's a cliché but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. 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.

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. Dan's like that." "You don't think he likes his job, then." "Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realises it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.

There was a reminder that the library was always seeking books, and that they paid in wine.

Hell is the absence of the people you long for

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. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.

This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air. Finally whispering the same two words over and over: “Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking.

it is possible to survive this but not unaltered, and you will carry these men with you through all the nights of your life.

Everything ends. I am not afraid.

The more we know about the former world, the better we’ll understand what happened when it fell.

If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain? Perhaps vessels are setting out even now, traveling toward or away from him, steered by sailors armed with maps and knowledge of the stars, driven by need or perhaps simply by curiosity: whatever became of the countries on the other side?

Time had been reset by catastrophe.

WHAT WAS LOST IN THE COLLAPSE: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. Twilight in the altered world, a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a parking lot in the mysteriously named town of St. Deborah by the Water, Lake Michigan shining a half mile away.

This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air.

Cold rain, the sidewalk shining, the shhh of car tires on the wet street. Thinking about the terrible gulf of years between eighteen and fifty.

The revelation of privacy: she can walk down the street and absolutely no one knows who she is. 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.

You can't argue with them, because they live by an entirely different logic.

I repent nothing. A line remembered from the fog of the Internet. I am heartless, she thinks, but she knows even through her guilt that this isn't true. She knows there are traps everywhere that can make her cry, she knows the way she dies a little every time someone asks her for change and she doesn't give it to them means that she's too soft for this world or perhaps just for this city, she feels so small here. There are tears in her eyes now. Miranda is a person with very few certainties, but one of them is that only the dishonorable leave when things get difficult.

No one had any idea, it turned out. 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.

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...

So this is how it ends, she thought, when the call was over, and she was soothed by the banality of it.

That's the thing I like about birthdays, they stay in one place.

Do you remember when we were young and gorgeous?

Κόλαση είναι η απουσία των ανθρώπων που λαχταράς.

She is beautiful in a way that makes people forget what they were going to say when they look at her.

Why, in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? The improbability of it. The sound of the engines faded, the airplane receding into blue until it was folded into silence and became a far-distant dot in the sky.

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.

I’ve heard of a dozen prophets over the years. It’s not an uncommon occupation.

I remember damage. Then escape. Then adrift in a stranger's galaxy for a long, long time. But I'm safe now.

I repent nothing,

He woke to quiet voices. This had been happening more and more lately, this nodding off unexpectedly, and it left him with an unsettled intimation of rehearsal. You fall asleep for short periods and then for longer periods and then forever.

he had an idea—too sentimental to speak aloud and he knew none of his divorced friends would ever own up to it—that something must linger, a half-life of marriage, some sense memory of love even if obviously not the thing itself. He thought these people must mean something to one another, even if they didn’t like one another anymore.

But these thoughts broke apart in his head and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air. Finally whispering the same two words over and over: “Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking.

An incomplete list: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one's hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite. No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn't true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked. No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. 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. No more avatars.

Did this happen to all actors, this blurring of borders between performance and life?

High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.

Jeevan was crushed by a sudden certainty that this was it, that this illness Hua was describing was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life.

Those previous versions of herself were so distant now that remembering them was almost like remembering other people, acquaintances, young women whom she’d known a long time ago, and she felt such compassion for them. “I regret nothing,” she told her reflection in the ladies’ room mirror, and believed it.

The disorientation of meeting one’s sagging contemporaries, memories of a younger face crashing into the reality of jowls, under-eye pouches, unexpected lines, and then the terrible realization that one probably looks just as old as they do. Do you remember when we were young and gorgeous? Clark wanted to ask. Do you remember when everything seemed limitless? Do you remember when it seemed impossible that you’d get famous and I’d get a PhD? But instead of saying any of this he wished his friend a happy birthday.

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

Love is like the lion's tooth.

Are you asking if I believe in ghosts?" "I don't know. Maybe. Yes." "Of course not. Imagine how many there'd be." "Yes," Kirsten said, "that's exactly it.

If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you.

The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour, And for me, now as then, it is too much. There is too much world. —Czeslaw Milosz The Separate Notebooks

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.

It's like the corporate world's full of ghosts … maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood's full of ghosts … these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed ... 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 … High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.

Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.

See, that illustrates the whole problem,” Dieter said. “The best Shakespearean actress in the whole territory, and her favourite line of text is from Star Trek.

They are always waiting, the people of the Undersea. They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.

Survival might be insufficient, she’d told Dieter in late-night arguments, but on the other hand, so was Shakespeare.

I don’t believe in the perfectibility of the individual. What was it in this statement that made Clark want to weep?

This was something he adored about her, the way she let things go so easily. What a pleasant state of affairs, he’d been thinking lately, to be with a woman who didn’t hold a grudge.

The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it? Perhaps soon humanity would simply flicker out, but Kirsten found this thought more peaceful than sad. So many species had appeared and later vanished from this earth; what was one more? How many people were even left now?

Opening the door, he nearly did a double take into the mirror behind him. Hooch. Hooch, pushing his shades back up onto his head, and re-shouldering the bergan. Hooch, standing in the doorway. “Been thinking.” Two words, more than usual. “Been around a bit.” Six, speech worthy of a national holiday. “Looking for a station now.” Eleven, whole fucking fireworks. "Central station.” Thirteen, and the heavens came down for Matt. “You still offering?” Sixteen, and the world stopped spinning. Matt stood thinking for a while, not a muscle in his face twitched. Then stepped aside, gestured the other man to follow him. Closed the door. “One condition.” Hooch’s brows rose for a split second. Matt broke into a grin at last, which threatened to split his face. “Promise not to talk too much.

The boy turns to his parents and for an instant in the twilight he looks like his namesake, like Jeevan’s brother. He comes to them, the moment already passed, and Jeevan lifts him into his arms to kiss the silk of his hair. Always these memories, barely submerged.

Toward the end of his second decade in the airport, Clark was thinking about how lucky he’d been. Not just the mere fact of survival, which was of course remarkable in and of itself, but to have seen one world end and another begin.

We have been lost for so long,’ ” she said, still quoting from 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.’ 

So this is how it ends, she thought, when the call was over, and she was soothed by the banality of it. You get a phone call in a foreign country, and just like that the man with whom you once thought you’d grow old has departed from this earth.

You know where I'm from," he said, and she understood what he meant by this. Once we lived on an island in the ocean. Once we took the ferry to go to high school, and at night the sky was brilliant in the absence of all these city lights. Once we paddled canoes to the lighthouse to look at petroglyphs and fished for salmon and walked through deep forests, but all of this was completely unremarkable because everyone else we knew did these things too, and here in these lives we've built for ourselves, here in these hard and glittering cities, none of this would seem real if it wasn't for you.

But the trouble, is she doesn’t really care. There was a time when this conversation would have reduced her to tears, but now she swivels in her chair to look out at the lake and thinks about moving trucks. She could call in sick to work, pack up her things, and be gone in a few hours. It is sometimes necessary to break everything.

Toward the end of his second decade in the airport, Clark was thinking about how lucky he’d been. Not just the mere fact of survival, which was of course remarkable in and of itself, but to have seen one world end and another begin. And not just to have seen the remembered splendors of the former world, the space shuttles and the electrical grid and the amplified guitars, the computers that could be held in the palm of a hand and the high-speed trains between cities, but to have lived among those wonders for so long. To have dwelt in that spectacular world for fifty-one years of his life. Sometimes he lay awake in Concourse B of the Severn City Airport and thought, “I was there,” and the thought pierced him through with an admixture of sadness and exhilaration.

He closed the fridge door, made his last breakfast - scrambled eggs - and showered, dressed, combed his hair, left for the theater an hour early so he'd have time to linger with the newspaper over his second-to-last coffee at his favorite coffee place, all of the small details that comprise a morning, a life.

You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light. You leave your garbage in bags on the curbside, 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 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 Kristen in an air-conditioned room, waking from an unsettling dream of walking through an empty landscape.

standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together.

I have walked all my life through this tarnished world. After she walked out of Toronto with her brother, after that first unremembered year, her brother had been plagued by nightmares. “The road,” he’d always said, when she shook him awake and asked what he’d been dreaming of. He’d said, “I hope you never remember it.

The night sky was brighter than it had been. On the clearest nights the stars were a cloud of light across the breadth of the sky, extravagant in their multitudes . . . The era of light pollution had come to an end. The increasing brilliance meant the grid was failing, darkness pooling over the earth. I was here for the end of electricity. The thought sent shivers up Clark's spine.

No,' Dahlia said, 'because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You know what I mean?' 'No, please elaborate.' 'Okay, say you go into the break room,' she said, 'and a couple people you like are there, say someone's telling a funny story, you laugh a little, you feel included, everyone's so funny, you go back to your desk with a sort of, I don't know, I guess afterglow would be the word? You go back to your desk with an afterglow, but then by four or five o'clock the day's just turned into yet another day, and you go on like that, looking forward to five o'clock and then the weekend and then your two or three annual weeks of paid vacation time, day in day out, and that's what happens to your life.

Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the as**sembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors’ dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.

There was a new heaven and a new earth,” the archer whispered. She saw the look on August’s face just afterward and realized that the gunman had been his first—he’d had the colossal good fortune to have made it to Year Twenty without killing anyone—and if she weren’t so tired, if it didn’t take all of her strength to keep breathing in the face of Sayid’s terrible news, she could have told him what she knew: it is possible to survive this but not unaltered, and you will carry these men with you through all the nights of your life.

Is it possible that somewhere there are ships setting out? If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain? Perhaps vessels are setting out even now, traveling toward or away from him, steered by sailors armed with maps and knowledge of the stars, driven by need or perhaps simply by curiosity; whatever became of the countries on the other side? If 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.

No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space. 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. No more avatars.

One of the few things that August didn't know about her was that sometimes when she looked at her collection of pictures she tried to imagine and place herself in that other, shadow life. You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills 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.

Let's go back to the train station,' she said. 'Or, rather, let's come back to this room, to the day when we sat here together for the first time and you recognised that I existed and gave me a gift. That was your first attempt to enter my soul, and you weren't sure whether or not you were welcome. But, as you say in your story, human beings were once divided and now seek the embrace that will reunite them. That is our instinct. But it is also our reason for putting up with all the difficulties we meet in that search.I want you to look at me, but I want you to take care that I don't notice. Initial desire is important because it is hidden, forbidden, not permitted. You don't know whether you are looking at your lost half or not; she doesn't know either, but something is drawing you together, and you must believe that it is true you are each other's "other half

He was thinking of the book, and what Dahlia had said about sleepwalking, and a strange thought came to him: had Arthur seen that Clark was sleepwalking? Would this be in the letters to V.? Because he had been sleepwalking, Clark realized, moving half-asleep through the motions of his life for a while now, years; not specifically unhappy, but when had he last found real joy in his work? When was the last time he'd truly been moved by anything? When had he last felt awe or inspiration? He wished he could somehow go back and find the iPhone people whom he'd jostled on the sidewalk earlier, apologize to them--I'm sorry, I've realized that I'm just as minimally present in this world as your are, I had no right to judge--and also he wanted of every 360° report and apologize to them too, because it's an awful thing to appear in someone else's report, he saw that now, it's an awful thing to be a target.