Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.

“This being the world, everyone’s dying,” he said.

“There is no more intimate act than play, even sex.”

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

Sadie Green liked being praised, and Sam Masur was the best friend she had ever had.

“There are people like you and like me. We have bad things happen to us, and we survive them. We are sturdy. But with people like your friend, you must be exceptionally gentle, or they may break.”

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

He wanted Ichigo’s life, a lifetime of endless, immaculate tomorrows, free of mistakes and the evidence of having lived.

A glimmer of a notion of a nothing of a whisper of a figment of an idea.

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

Sam did not believe his body could feel anything but pain, and so he did not desire pleasure in the same way that other people seemed to. Sam was happiest when his body was feeling nothing. He was happiest when he did not have to think about his body—when he could forget that he had a body at all.

Why was it acceptable for apparently well-meaning people to see the world in such a general way?

How much of your life had been happenstance? How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky? But then, weren’t all lives that way? Who could say, in the end, that they had chosen any of it?

“What’s better than work?” He paused. “What’s worse than work?”

“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.”

“And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”