Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

“You’re incredibly gifted, Sam. But it is worth noting that to be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.”

the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.”

“The child’s body moves the way a body can move before it has felt or even encountered the idea of pain.”

There is no purity in art.

There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living.

Illness could not be defeated, no matter how hard you fought, and pain, once it had you in its grasp, was transformational.

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?

There are no ghosts, but up here”—she gestured toward her head—“it’s a haunted house.”

There is no purity to bearing pain alone.

Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.