50 Important Quotes You Should Pay Attention to in Station Eleven

Download our list of Station Eleven quotes now!

#11: “You think you kneel before a man, but you kneel before the sunrise. We are the light moving over the surface of the waters, over the darkness of the undersea.”

• Techniques: Parallelism (to Mirandas’s death), symbolism, subversion of biblical imagery
• Characters: The Prophet/Tyler Leander (Speaker), Kirsten Raymonde
• Chapter 50

#12: 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.

• Techniques: Melancholic tone, simile, temporal language, symbolism (moths = death) 
• Characters: Arthur Leander, Miranda Caroll 
• Chapter 53

Quotes about Damage and Memory from Station Eleven

#13: 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.

• Techniques: Plot twist, anticlimax 
• Characters: Bartender, Arthur Leander
• Chapter 2 

#14: I don’t know, Jeevan. That’s the short answer. I don’t know what’s going on. It’s a flu, that much is obvious, but I’ve never seen anything like it. It is so fast. It just seems to spread so quickly–

• Techniques: Foreshadowing, exposition, truncated urgent sentences 
• Characters: Hua (Speaker), Jeevan Chaudhary
• Chapter 3 

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

• Techniques: Foreshadowing, hyperbole, temporal language
• Characters: Jeevan Chaudhary, Hua
• Chapter 3 

#16: I repent nothing. A line remembered from the fog of the Internet.

• Techniques: Motif, double-entendre, character juxtaposition (to Tyler)
• Characters: Miranda Caroll 
• Chapter 4

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

• Techniques: Contrast, melancholic tone, motif 
• Characters: Kirsten Raymonde, Arthur Leander
• Chapter 8

#18: Because we are always looking for the former world, before all the traces of the former world are gone. 

• Techniques: Yearning tone, repetition
• Characters: Kirsten Raymonde 
• Chapter 20 

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

• Techniques: Sibilance, poetic tone, genre subversion 
• Characters: August (Speaker), Kirsten Raymonde
• Chapter 23

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

• Techniques: Motif (Past and present), characterisation 
• Characters: Raymonde (Speaker), Dallo
• Chapter 37

#21: These people living out their lives in underwater fallout shelters, clinging to the hope that the world they remembered would be restored. The undersea was limbo.

• Techniques: Metaphor, symbolism (Doctor Eleven comics), juxtaposition 
• Characters: Miranda Caroll, Arthur Leander, Kirsten 
• Chapter 39

#22: She saw ghosts of herself everywhere here. A twenty-three-year-old Miranda with the wrong clothes and her hair sticking up…a twenty-seven- year-old recently divorced Miranda slouching across the lobby with her sunglasses in place, wishing she could disappear 

• Techniques: Polysyndeton, metaphor (‘ghosts’), vivid imagery, temporal language
• Characters: Miranda Caroll, Arthur Leander
• Chapter 39 

#23: The maintenance of sanity required some recalibrations having to do with memory and sight. There were things Clark trained himself not to think about. Everyone he’d ever known outside the airport, for instance.

• Techniques: Tone, methodical diction, irony, motif (past and present) 
• Characters: Clark Thompson, Dolores 
• Chapter 43

#24: There seemed to be a limitless number of objects in the world that had no practical use but that people wanted to preserve: cell phones with their delicate buttons, iPads, Tyler’s nintendo console, a selection of laptops.   

• Techniques: Lexical chain, irony
• Characters: Clark Thompson
• Chapter 44

#25: How could this table have remained set, when the rest of the house was ransacked and in disarray? Now that Kirsten looked, she realized there was no dust on the tea set. The only footprints in the dust were hers and Charlie’s, and Charlie wasn’t sitting close enough to the table to touch it. 

• Techniques: Supernatural imagery, subversion of motif (Past and present)
• Characters: Kirsten Raymonde, Charlie 
• Chapter 51

#26: A thousand miles to the south of the airport, Jeevan is baking bread in an outdoor oven. He rarely thinks of his old life anymore, although he has dreams sometimes about a stage, an actor fallen in the shimmering snow 

• Techniques: Arcadian literary style, pastoral imagery, consonance
• Characters: Jeevan Chaudhary, Frank Chaudhary
• Chapter 52

Civilisation 

#27: This was during the final month of the era when it was possible to press a series of buttons on a telephone and speak with someone on the far side of the earth.

• Techniques: Temporal language, sibilance, dramatic tone 
• Characters: Clark Thompson, Arthur Leander, Miranda
• Chapter 5

#28: 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.

• Techniques: Lamenting tone, lexical chain, catacosmesis
• Characters: Narration
• Chapter 6

#29: “I submit,” the prophet said, “that everything that has ever happened on this earth has happened for a reason.”

• Techniques: Fatalistic tone, foil character, hyperbole, catechism 
• Characters: the Prophet/Tyler Leander (Speaker), Kirsten Raymonde 
• Chapter 12

#30: “The flu,” the Prophet said, “the great cleansing that we suffered twenty years ago, that 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…We were saved because we are the light. We are pure.”

• Techniques: Biblical apocalyptic reference, sinister tone 
• Characters: the Prophet/Tyler Leander (Speaker), Kirsten Raymonde, Dieter 
• Chapter 12

#31: It was the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. It was gorgeous and claustrophobic. I loved it and I always wanted to escape. 

• Techniques: Contrast, superlative, oxymoronic language 
• Characters: Arthur Leander (Speaker)
• Chapter 13

#32: “My poor corporate baby,” he said. “Lost in the machine.” Pablo talks about metaphorical machines a lot, also the Man. He sometimes combines the two, as in “That’s how the Man wants us, just trapped right there in the corporate machine.” 

• Techniques: Metaphor, analepsis, subversion of motif (Nostalgic past v present)
• Characters: Pablo (Speaker), Miranda Caroll
• Chapter 14

#33: 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. 

• Techniques: Violent and zealous tone, biblical imagery, irony  
• Characters: August (Speaker), Kirsten Raymonde, the Prophet/Tyler Leander (Speaker)
• Chapter 23

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

• Techniques: Metonym, casual tone, biblical allusion (to apocalypse narratives) 
• Characters: Kirsten Raymonde, the Tuba
• Chapter 24

#35: 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?

• Techniques: Literary allusion (Sartre’s quote on hell and people), rhetorical question, surrendered tone 
• Characters: Kirsten Raymonde, August
• Chapter 24

#36: 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.

• Techniques: Analepsis, metaphor (‘ghosts’) subversion of motif (Nostalgic past v present)
• Characters: Dahlia (Speaker), Clark Thompson
• Chapter 26

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

• Techniques: Polysyndeton, pathos
• Characters: Frank Chaudhary (Speaker), Jeevan Chaudhary
• Chapter 34

Station Eleven Quotes about Art and Creation

#38: Twenty years after the end of air travel, the caravans of the Traveling Symphony moved slowly under a white-hot sky.

• Techniques: Temporal language, juxtaposition, motif (Airplanes) 
• Characters: Kirsten Raymonde, Dieter 
• Chapter 7

#39: but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings. “People want what was best about the world,” Dieter said. 

• Techniques: Irony, Shakespearean parallel (plague-affected England) 
• Characters: Dieter
• Chapter 7

#40: The Symphony was insufferable, hell was other flutes or other people or whoever had used the last of the rosin or whoever missed the most rehearsals, but the truth was that the Symphony was their only home.

• Techniques: Polysyndeton, metonym, anticlimax, juxtaposition (‘hell’ and ‘home’)
• Characters: August 
• Chapter 10 

#41: 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 the parking lot in the mysteriously named St. Deborah by the Water, Lake Michigan shining a half a mile away.

• Techniques: Contrast, fragmented language, Shakespearean allusion, hopeful tone (symbolised by Midsummer Night’s Dream)
• Characters: Kirsten Raymonde
• Chapter 11

#42: The paperweight was a smooth lump of glass with storm clouds in it, about the size of a plum. It was of no practical use whatsoever, nothing but dead weight in the bag but she found it beautiful.

• Techniques: Motif, natural imagery, auxesis, contrast  
• Characters: Kirsten Raymonde
• Chapter 12

#43: And she feels a peculiar giddiness when she reads this fourth text. There are thoughts of freedom and imminent escape. I could throw almost everything away, she thinks, and begin all over again. Station Eleven will be my constant. 

• Techniques: Hopeful tone, third-person narration, foreshadowing
• Characters: Kirsten Raymonde
• Chapter 14 

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

• Techniques: Foil characters, subversion of Shakespearean motif, repetition  
• Characters: Miranda Caroll
• Chapter 14

#45: “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.” 

• Techniques: Irony, analepsis, symbolism, motif (Doctor Eleven Comics)
• Characters: Tesch (Speaker), Miranda Caroll(Speaker), Arthur Leander
• Chapter 15

#46: 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.

• Techniques: Metaphor, temporal language, hopeful tone  
• Characters: Kirsten Raymonde 
• Chapter 19

#47: What the Symphony was doing, what they were always doing, was trying to cast a spell, and costuming helped; the lives they brushed up against were work-worn and difficult, people who spent all their time engaged in the tasks of survival. 

• Techniques: Consonance, pastoral imagery, Arcadian literary allusion  
• Characters: Kirsten Raymonde 
• Chapter 24

#48: 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. The lights of the fleet fading into the morning, the ocean burning into sky.

• Techniques: Symbolism, fantastical imagery, bittersweet tone 
• Characters: Miranda Caroll
• Chapter 41

#49: ‘I have a present for you.’ He felt a little guilty as he handed her the Dr. Eleven comics, …. but he didn’t want the comics because he didn’t want possessions. He didn’t want anything except his son. 

• Techniques: Motif (Dr. Eleven comics), tricolon, epiphanic tone 
• Characters: Arthur Leander (Speaker), Kirsten Raymonde 
• Chapter 53

#50: He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, toward another world just out of sight.

• Techniques: Hopeful tone, metaphor, subversion of motif (past VS present) 
• Characters: Clark Thompson 
• Chapter 55