Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

“I saw it!” she said. Her eyes were bright, and she wore an expression he remembered from when she was eleven.

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.

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

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

So, he protected Sam, and he made the world a little easier for Sam, and it cost him next to nothing to do so. Marx’s life had been filled with such abundance that he was one of those people who found it natural to care for those around him.

These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.

There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities.

Other people’s parents are often a delight.

No one took him, and his queries, more seriously than she did.

It was never worth worrying about someone you didn’t love. And it wasn’t love if you didn’t worry.

She was intelligent, but her intelligence didn’t get in the way of her enthusiasm.

Sadie had been amused by that review: clever reviewers across all media liked to refer to things that were not characters as characters.

ludic dissonance

Zero chance anyone says this phrase in 1999

“So I’m clear: It’s work when you do it. But it’s a vacation when I do it.”

She felt, perhaps, old. She was still only twenty-five, but until that point, she had always been the youngest in any room she’d been in, and she had derived power from that.

his disdain for his former itinerancy had made it so he could not recognize the reasons a person should stay.

“I’m trusting you with Hella Behemoth,” Marx said.

lol would never let someone do this

He had framed the story in a humorous way, smoothed off some of the edges of his hostility toward the woman in the park.

“Maybe you need to let more people know you.”

in the end, he had to resign himself to the reality that he wasn’t a protester, an organizer, or even a political person.

“How did we get through?” Bong Cha had been baffled by Sam’s question. “We got up in the morning,” she said finally. “We went to work. We went to the hospital. We came home. We went to sleep. We did it again.”

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

Maybe it wasn’t enough, but it was what he could do.

The length of time it had taken Dong Hyun to die also meant he had said everything he wanted to say to Sam, his cousins, and his grandmother. Was this trade worth his suffering? Sam didn’t know.

a zip drive

??

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.