Quotes From Station 11 That Altered My Brain Chemistry
A deep dive into my notes and annotations on Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel
This book had been on my TBR for as long as I can remember but for some reason, it was one of those titles I almost always forgot about whenever I went to a bookstore or had a chance to buy one. I finally started reading it when I received it as a gift from one of my friends (I cannot thank that friend enough, ever, because otherwise, I don't think I'd have ever actually read it). Trust me, by the time I reached the last page, I knew one thing for sure—this book is one of the best things that ever happened to me.
This was one of the pieces that made me sit and just think about my life and how many things I’ve always taken for granted. It wasn’t something direct—the themes in the book ran deeper than I thought they would. My sole reason to pick this up was because of my obsession with the themes related to survival and apocalypse (I blame that on hunger games. It was the first post apocalyptic book I ever read and loved), but while reading it, I realized that the book had struck a chord with me—this was an experience through which I got to know both myself and the world more deeply.
I could throw away almost everything, she thinks, and begin all over again. Station Eleven will be my constant.
I’ve been a writer since I was eight years old. It has always been an escape for me, something I’d turn to in the darkest of times to feel a sense of relief. I did relate to Miranda’s character quite a bit. Having a passion project close to your heart that you’re just writing for yourself, not for someone else—creating a reflection of you as a person. It’s the only thing that you need, it’s the only thing that is one hundred percent yours because you created it.
The dinner table scene absolutely broke me. There was just something about it—something about Miranda's realization that felt like a punch to my gut because, I mean, why wouldn't it? Haven't we all felt that we're in a place where we don't belong at least once in our life? Haven't we all felt at least once that the person we loved the most doesn't actually feel the same for us? Nothing hurts more than realizing that someone for whom you would give up everything would never do the same for you. Nothing hurts more than the realization that even if you ripped your heart out of your ribcage and served it up on a plate to them, they'd still never be satisfied with it.
Feeling like an outsider in your own house, where you’re supposed to let your guard down and let your feelings flow, is the worst.
At that point, of course you’d turn to the one thing that would never betray you. Your work. Your passion. Your art. Your own little universe that you created in a world so cruel so that you can have a little peace.
It’s crazy how you can feel more at home in a fantasy world you created than in your reality, but then again, it’s not something uncommon. Don’t we all need a bit of an escape at times?
A fragment for my friend—
If your soul left this earth
I would follow and find you
Silent, my starship suspended in night.
Kirsten and August’s friendship is something very close to my heart.
In a world where the civilisation has collapsed and there’s not really much people out there, I imagine it must be hard for a person to find a friend, not just a survival buddy. I think that’s what Kirsten and August were to each other—they were friends who met in the travelling symphony, who explored abandoned houses together, going through old magazines, talking about parallel universes.
In a world that has ended, to find a person who would talk about the future with you, who would dream of a better world with you, who would really be interested in the what ifs and who would dream about different worlds and universes and possibilities when survival is the only thing at hand has to be equivalent to finding treasure and loads of money in today’s date.
It’s like a sailor and north star, a ship and its anchor, a guide*, a promise.*
To have someone who’d never abandon you.
A person who’d hope with you.
A person who’d dream with you.
A person who’d find follow your soul and find you if you were to get lost.
Isn’t that we all crave for, even in a world where we’re surrounded by people all the time?
Hell is the absence of people you long for.
Have you ever found a person with whom your soul became intertwined, and when they left, there was a gaping hole in your soul? A permanent wound that we tend to call "longing"?
We’re all humans at the end of the day, aren’t we? We’re all humans. We’re all selfish to some extent. We all have our flaws. We’ve all done bad things, but that doesn’t really mean that we are bad people. We all have regrets, things we want to forget. And moreover, we all have had relationships that have ended.
Some just fade away as you grow up, some end up in a disastrous fight that leaves you in tears for countless nights. It’s all a part of growing up, yes, but then again, we all have found one person at least once in our lives that made us feel safe, seen, comfortable and loved. They swallow us in their warmth, bathe us in happiness, comfort us with their presence.
When they leave, we crave for that comfort. Crave for the understanding. Crave for that feeling that they’d given to us so much that we try to look for it in others. You crave for their presence. You long for the person.
And I think that’s why this line stayed with me for so long. Hell is having no person with you, being all alone and never understood. Hell is being misjudged by every single person you ever come across, never being given a chance to speak up for yourself. Hell is missing the people you love, even when they don’t love you back. Hell is reaching out for the light but never quite touching it, drawing back before you can feel its warmth. Hell is the hole in your heart. Hell is a fracture in your soul. Hell is right here, dwelling in our minds, right inside of us.
“Here’s the thing, kids, the entire world is a place where artifacts from the old world are preserved. When was the last time you saw a new car?”
You start to realise how much a small thing affected you until it’s gone from your life completely. We are so comfortable in this world at the moment that we don’t realise how many things we’re taking for granted.
There are cars running around.
There are trains, metros, airplanes.
There are phones, computers, laptops and tablets.
There are new models of electronic devices coming out every single day.
One click, and you can send a message to someone across the world.
One click, and you can hear the voice of the person you love the most even if they’re across the ocean, away from you.
One click, and you can see your family on a video call because you’re homesick when you’re working a job in a city away from them.
Day by day, there are developments that enhance the world we live so that it’s easy and convenient.
What if, one day, all of that disappears?
That’s what one of the things station eleven is about. One day, if all these things stop working, all our phones would be junk. Everything that is important to us, that we think we need to survive will be waste and useless, considered as ‘artifacts’ in the civilisation.
When we dive into the museum of civilisation, that’s what we see—phones, laptops, driving licenses, nintendo. Everything that holds importance to us can turn into nothing in a split second.
That’s what it’s all about. To learn how to appreciate things and not take them for granted but at the same time, not to make your life too dependent on these, because if you make something your everything, it hurts too much to watch it turn into nothing.
I’m a terrible actor and this city is fucking freezing and I miss you.
I think like this moment in the book should be talked about more. V is a person Arthur feels very comfortable with, and later in a scene with Miranda, he talks about how, in some ways, it’s also his fault that the book full of letters sin being published, because he had started to treat his friend like a writer.
I don’t know why this quote is there, to be honest. I think I just like the vulnerability that arthur presents here. The frustration of being in a city away from everything you’ve ever known chasing after something that isn’t easy to get—you run after it and you tire but you run after it anyways Because you just want it that bad but sometimes, you just need a break from it all and pause. At that moment, you begin to doubt yourself and everything around you. It’s like a spiral and you’re falling down, questioning whether all of this is really worth it or not.
That’s what i like about this part of the book.
It shows the highs and the lows and the cost of fame.
Something I’ve been thinking about, which will sound harsh and I’m sorry: you said you’d always be my friend but you’re not, actually, are you? I’ve only realised that recently. You don’t have any interest in my life.
As someone who has always struggled with friendships, I can’t even begin to tell the number of times I read this particular letter. I’ve had people in my life that I cared about the most with whom I’ve drifted apart in the worst ways possible. I’ve had friends who were interested in my life until one day they weren’t and those moments of realisations were the ones where I cried myself to sleep at night, knowing that I have to let some friendships go to give way to new ones.
There have been moments in my lives where I’ve realised that all the efforts I’d put were going nowhere and I felt taken for granted but I had been a people pleaser back then, so I’d continue to put in efforts till those people faded away from my life completely and nothing has hurt me more than that. At that time, I had always been the type of person to get attached to people really quickly, to become dependent on them emotionally, turn to someone else for support instead of supporting myself on my own.
It's not bad to have a support system—it's just concerning when you're not comfortable with spending time with yourself. I learned this the hard way when, for the first time in my life a few years ago, I had to accept the fact that a person I cared deeply about was not going to be there for me anymore.
It was as if a huge part of myself was ripped away from me and I was lost, like a sailor on a stormy night who can't find the north star. I felt like I was going to suffocate and drown, falling back to rock bottom—the very place from which this person had once rescued me.
It had been my fault.
To make lean on a person so much that they just couldn’t take my weight anymore.
This is going to seem bitter but I don’t mean it that way, V., I’m just stating a fact here: you’ll only ever call me if I call you first. Have you noticed that? If I call you and leave a message you’ll call me back, but you will never call me first.
As I said before, I had always struggled with friendships. I'd say I have quite bad luck with them, which has ultimately left me scared to be close to anyone anymore. I stopped putting in any kind of effort—calling people first, texting them first—just because I'm too scared to get close to them. I pull away before I can feel the slightest comfort, and that has led me to have fewer connections, but those connections are the most genuine things in my life right now.
It's a different topic, of course, but this particular letter about Arthur and his view on his friendship with V made me think about how I've been on both sides of the story. It made me reflect on all the friendships I've had and currently have, and made me question: how long will I struggle to maintain bonds with the people around me?
At times, I feel like I’m the one at fault to drive people away from me but then again, there’s always two sides of the same coin. Nothing in this world is black and white and I can go on and on in detail about how my friendships have been since the start but instead of always spiraling down that path, I’ve began to appreciate the good friendships I have, friendships that aren’t high maintenance, friendships that don’t feel like a chore to me.
Friendships where I can be myself and they can be themselves and there’s absolutely no judgment.
Friendships where I don’t have to make any grand gestures.
Friendships where I don’t feel like I’m failing a person just because I didn’t talk to them one day.
Friendships that built me and who I am.
I always come to you. You always say you’re my friend but you’ll never come to me and I think I have to stop listening to your words, V., and take stock instead in your actions.
Here’s the thing: the harsh truth of life is that you’re not always meant to be compatible with a person forever. People grow. People change. We’re not the same people we were ten years ago. We are made of memories and experiences, and every moment we’ve lived through built us as a person.
We humans love to live in our comfort zones. We love to think that a person would stay with us forever. We love to build dreams where we imagine a future with someone, trying to deny the fact that nothing is set in stone. And when the person starts to draw away, we find it hard to believe. We do everything to make them stay. We hope. We beg. If only the world worked that way.
At last, we break.
Just like Arthur, we begin to take stock into people’s action instead of their words.
Truth is hard to believe at times, after all, and words spin up the most beautiful web of lies there ever can be. actions, though—they’re hard to fake.
Love is like a lion’s tooth.
Love is a paradox.
A lion’s tooth.
It can be the most tragic and beautiful thing that happens to a person and the duality is hard to accept but it’s the truth. Love is a force so passionate that it can built and destroy at the same time. It’s unpredictable. It’s complex.
Just like most things in life, it’s an experience.
Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. we bemoaned the personality 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, their entire operation comes to an halt.
Moving on from love and relationships, we’re back to the civilization aspect of Station 11.
I had been intrigued by Jeevan’s character from the start. I mean, the word ‘Jeevan’ translates to ‘life’ in Hindi, and having a character named Jeevan in a book where the world ends is pretty interesting isn’t it?
The world is a web of people and I think Jeevan’s character defines that analogy perfectly. He had been a paparazzi, when he’s originally met Miranda and Arthur. It’s pretty fascinating how he had been standing outside Arthur’s home for hours as a paparazzi and at the end of Arthur’s life, when he had begun his journey into the medical world, he had been there. He’d been intertwined with his life one way or the other and that just brings me back to the quote above.
“A massive delicate infrastructure of people.”
As a paparazzi, it was his job to cover Arthur’s life.
As a paramedic, it was his responsibility to jump and try to save his life.
We all have jobs that we’re defined by to some extent.
An architect designs buildings. A news reporter keeps you up to date with everything that is happening in the world. The maid helps you out with tasks at home. Numerous clerks and employees in every company that keep it going. The farmers in the countryside who grow food and sell it in the market.
The list will never end, because there are 8 billion people in the world and all of them have to do something or the other to survive in a world like this.
What would happen if people stop going to work?
There’d be no one to bring petrol to the stations. No one who clean up your toilets and pipes. No one to grow food. No electricity. No healthcare. Nothing.
There are so many things in the world that are just handed to us in a plate and we never question where it comes from and we never really will, to be honest, unless it stops coming to us so easily. We’ve gotten so used to the comfort of the world that we’ve begun to take so many thing for granted that we don’t even realise it. And perhaps, we never will.
“I think there’s just survival out there, Jeevan. I think you should go out there and try to survive.”
This line made me wonder if I’d ever really be able to survive if something was to happen to the world. I think we all have wondered whether or not we have the appropriate survival instincts to survive in a brutal world.
For what it’s worth, I hope I never find out.
I’ve been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions about money 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 it’s a cliche 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.
Another aspect of human nature that is talked about in the book: the desire to be remembered for your art.
Arthur was an artist and so was his first wife, Miranda. What makes them so different?
Arthur wanted to be immortal. He was too consumed by the fame at one point that he had always wanted more. He was successful and remarkable at what he did, and I think at one point of his life, he got too consumed by it all to stop for a second and look how far he’d come.
By the time he’d stopped and taken a pause, the damage at been done.
Sure, he had come far in his life but in the process, he had lost most of the real connections he’d had in his life. In his last moments, all he could think about was not his popularity, but his memories that he’d always taken for granted. All he craved for at that point of his life was to be close to his son, which he never got to be because of his unexpected death.
Miranda, on the other hand, was an artist who never published her work. She worked on it, polished it till it was perfect. It was a reflection of her life and her solitude—it was her baby, the only thing that she loved and owned till the end. It was her passion and she put her everything into the project and till the end, she remained humble.
Her death scene, the sunrise, tugged my heart in ways I didn’t expect. She’s been my favourite character throughout the story. I loved every moment of her—she was a really strong character who I respected.
“Do you remember chocolate chip cookies?”
“I dream of chocolate chip cookies. don’t torture me.”
This was a heartwarming scene in the book.
I have a friend who ordered chocolate chunk cookies from her favourite place and made me try it. It’s now my favourite as well. Whenever I read these dialogues from the book, I instantly remember her and appreciate everything she does for me.
I wonder what I would’ve missed the most.
Maybe the blueberry cheesecake from my favourite cafe. The coffee my mother makes. The tea I drink every morning. The chocolate chip cookies my friend gets for me. Movie screenings. Spotify playlists. Anticipating for new books to be released so that I can read them as soon as possible.
So many things I’ve never appreciated in my life.
I guess I’ll never know what I’ll crave for the most when I lose everything all at once.
But then again, at the end of the day, the memories are what will stay. It’s the people I’ll miss. It’s the moments I’d want to relive. I don’t want to die with a list of regrets in my life. I want to live in the moment, and try to be kind and appreciate the good things in life.
Because, well, as Dr. Eleven once said—the world is an ocean of darkness anyways, right? We only long to go home. We dream of sunlight, we dream of walking on earth. we have been lost for so long. We long only for the world we were born into.
We crave the peace.
We crave the nostalgia.
We crave the simplicity.
And most importantly, we crave the feeling of being alive—the feeling of being free of everything. There have been times when we take a pause and think about all the things we’ve gone through and feel the disbelief and surprise that we made it through. We’re shocked.
Maybe that’s what it’s all about.
The shock of being alive.
Dr. Eleven: What was it like for you, at the end?
Captain Lonogan: It was exactly like waking up from a dream.