Emily St. John Mandel

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.

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.

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

Adulthood__ full of ghosts... High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.

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?

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.