Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love.

This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”

If she was cool, this time won’t have been a waste. Life is very long, she thought, unless it is not.

She had, he thought, one of the world’s great laughs. The kind of laugh where a person didn’t feel that he was being laughed at. The kind of laugh that was an invitation: I cordially invite you to join in this matter that I find amusing.

These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.

he had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.

There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.

But the best thing Marx did for them was this: He believed in them. He loved Ichigo. He loved Sam. He was growing to love Sadie, too.

“We’ve never…It’s more than romantic. It’s better than romance. It’s friendship.” Sam laughed. “Who cares about romance anyway?”

Sam’s grandfather had two core beliefs: (1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken. Sam believed these things as well.

Dov gave her the engine, and in exchange, he became a producer and equity partner on Ichigo, bonding him to her professional life forever.

Sadie knew that Sam loved her in the same way she knew that Sam had not seen the Magic Eye.

she worried that people would think her work was his work. That they wouldn’t know where her work began and his work ended.

Sadie felt uncomfortable speaking about the work—the work, she naively felt, should speak for itself.

what was the difference in the end? It was never worth worrying about someone you didn’t love. And it wasn’t love if you didn’t worry.

it occurred to Sadie that nothing in life was as solid-state as it appeared.

Winning is accepting that there are some races a person cannot win.

Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.

He was happiest when he did not have to think about his body—when he could forget that he had a body at all.

“What’s mine is yours. Except when it’s something no one else likes.”

Tell me I don’t know you, Sam thought. Tell me I don’t know you when I could draw both sides of this hand, your hand, from memory.

He would know that if he hadn’t been the person he was, terrified and cowardly and petty and insecure and sexually panicked and broken, Sadie might have been his.

You may not ever have a romantic relationship with Sadie, but you two will be friends for the rest of your lives, and that is something of equal or greater value, if you choose to see it that way.”

Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met—he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty.

The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

This was a tautology that had only taken her the better part of two decades to understand.