Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

But people—the ordinary, the decent and basically honest—couldn’t get through the day without that one indispensable bit of programming that allowed you to say one thing and mean, feel, even do, another.

Time was mathematically explicable; it was the heart—the part of the brain represented by the heart—that was the mystery.

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

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

“I think you mean a public failure. Because we all fail in private. I failed with you, for example, but no one posted an online review about it, unless you did. I fail with my wife and with my son. I fail in my work every day, but I keep turning over the problems until I’m not failing anymore. But public failures are different, it’s true.”

It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”