Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

That Love is all there is, Is all we know of Love; It is enough, the freight should be Proportioned to the groove.

How much proof do you ever have that we’re all in the same world?”

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.

If this were a game, he could hit pause. He could restart, say different things, the right ones this time. He could search his inventory for the item that would make Sadie not leave.

In the old days, when Sam was a child, people could be lost forever, but people were not as easily lost as they once were. Increasingly, all you needed was the desire to convert a person from a digital conjecture to the unruly flesh.

Sadie liked the phrase “an abundance of caution.” It reminded her of a murder of crows, a flock of seagulls, a pack of wolves. She imagined that “caution” was a creature of some kind—maybe,

In Sadie’s art class at school, she had been taught to draw by breaking things down into basic shapes. To depict this boy, she would have needed mainly circles.

Although Sadie liked to be the player, there was a pleasure to watching someone who was a dexterous player—it was like watching a dance.

“They might have to cut it off. I can’t stand on it at all. I’ve already had three surgeries and it’s not even a foot. It’s a flesh bag, with bone chips in it.”

And 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.”

It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.”

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

Sadie found Dov vulgar, repellent, and a little sexy.

Maybe she had been like the player in Solution. Maybe she hadn’t asked the right or enough questions because she hadn’t wanted to know the answers.

Yes, she loved him, but she also liked him. She liked herself when she was with him.

Adults always thought they could fix children’s problems.

They’d never been friendly in Cambridge, but in L.A., they had become instant best friends in the way people can in their twenties.

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.”

Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty.

(They say success kills relationships, but the lack of it will do it just as quickly.)

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.

“There is a pleasure to the joining of property as well, otherwise why would we all keep doing it? ‘Pleasure’ might be too strong a word. If not a pleasure, let us say an interest. It develops the plot.”

You couldn’t be old and still be wrong about as many things as she’d been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.