Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

the thing about games is, if you get good at one game, you can be good at any game. That’s what I think. They’re all hand-eye coordination and observing patterns.”

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.

“A maze,” he would say, “is a video game distilled to its purest form.”

To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.

it could hurt your friend’s feelings, if he thinks he is a charity to you, and not a genuine friendship.” “Can’t something be both?” Sadie said. “Friendship is friendship, and charity is charity,”

You would think women would want to stick together when there weren’t that many of them, but they never did. It was as if being a woman was a disease that you didn’t wish to catch. As long as you didn’t associate with the other women, you could imply to the majority, the men: I’m not like those other ones.

The problem with your game is not that it’s a shooter, but that it’s a bad shooter and it has no character.”

And so she’d be cool, because that’s what mistresses were. Mistress, Sadie thought. Sadie laughed a bit to herself, thinking this was what it was like to play someone else’s game: to have the illusion of choice, without actual choice.

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.

to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.

Beauty, after all, is almost always a matter of angles and resolve.

this is the truth of any game—it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.”

It is important to make things visual for people. If you can do that, you’ll be ahead of the game, Sam my boy.

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.

There is no purity in art. The process of how you arrive at something doesn’t matter at all.

What does love even mean when you can find it with so many people and things?”

In games, the thing that matters most is the order of things. The game has an algorithm, but the player also must create a play algorithm in order to win. There is an order to any victory. There is an optimal way to play any game.

Clownerina may have been kitsch, but Sadie adored him. He represented the spirit of California to her—and for the first time in her life, she fully embraced her native city. She donated her winter coats to Goodwill, and she started wearing floppy hats and maxi dresses. She went to flea markets with Zoe, and they shopped for vintage vinyl and long necklaces and artisanal pottery. She burned incense and gave up caffeine. She grew her hair long, down to her waist, and parted it in the middle. She started doing Pilates, and she threw Dov’s handcuffs into the sea. She dated—a scruffily handsome guy in an indie rock band, a scruffily handsome actor who was mainly known for indie films, a scruffily handsome tech guy who had sold his dot-com to a bigger dot-com. She threw elaborate dinner parties and prided herself on knowing the new bands before anyone else did. She bought a used VW bug the color of the California sky. She had brunch with her family every Sunday. She woke early, slept very little, and routinely worked eighteen-hour days. If California was a costume that could be worn, Sadie wore it as easily as Clownerina wore his tutu and derby hat.

Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.

But public failures are different, it’s true.” “So, what do I do?” she asked. “You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it’s a perfect time for you to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.”

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

in business, they call this a pivot. But life is filled with them, too. The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets. 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.”

Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?

senbazuru.

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.”

“I suppose we drink and we smoke for the same reasons it is done elsewhere. We must fill our infinite days with something.”

Something I’ve learned is that when you don’t have many resources, you have to be even more rigorous with your style. Limitations are style if you make them so.”

art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.