Instructions for Dancing

by Nicola Yoon

The book of love is long and boring No one can lift the damn thing It’s full of charts and facts and figures And instructions for dancing But I I love it when you read to me And you You can read me anything —The Magnetic Fields, “The Book of Love” Almost nobody gets out of love alive. —Helen Fisher

The time we get is the time we get.”

You can miss the future with people who are still alive too.

Happiness is tricky. Sometimes you have to fight for it. Sometimes, though—the best times—it sneaks up behind you, wraps an arm around your waist and pulls you close.

It was beautiful. But it was sad too. Both things, and at the same time. I don’t know why so much of life is like that.

When she looks out, she sees the city she already knows, and the places she’s already been and everything she’s already lost.

If you get very, very lucky in this life, then you get to love another person so hard and so completely that when you lose them, it rips you apart. I think the pain is the proof of a life well lived and loved.”

Love is the question and the answer and the reason to ask in the first place. It’s everything. All of it.”

Everyone says there’s a moment in your life when your parent becomes more than just a parent and becomes a real person.

“I don’t know what happened with you and X, but I hope you know you can’t cut yourself off from love either.” “I’ll be okay by myself,” I insist. She laughs at me. “You ever hear the one about the fish that didn’t need water?” “No,” I say. “Me neither,” she says.

Mom said just because a thing ends doesn’t make the thing any less real. Just because everything is different now doesn’t mean we didn’t love each other once. Maybe we will again.

In romance books there’s always a chase scene. It happens near the end, when one person realizes they’ve made a colossal mistake and then has to go through a series of obstacles to get back to the other person. My chase scene starts just outside the hotel, where there is a line of cabs waiting. It’s only after I get into one that I realize I don’t know X’s address.