Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

when she spotted Sam, the smile spread over her face like a time-lapse video he had once seen in a high school physics class of a rose in bloom.

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.

to be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.”

Friendship,” Marx said, “is kind of like having a Tamagotchi.”

Several hours later, he had finished the reading, which had been about Chinese immigration to America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how Chinese immigrants had only been allowed to do certain kinds of work, like food or cleaning, and that’s why there were so many Chinese restaurants and Chinese laundries, i.e., systemic racism.

“Promise me, we won’t ever do this again,” Sadie said. “Promise me, that no matter what happens, no matter what dumb thing we supposedly perpetrate on each other, we won’t ever go six years without talking to each other. Promise me you’ll always forgive me, and I promise I’ll always forgive you.” 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.

an artist’s first idea is usually the best one.

She could tell you exactly what was wrong with any game, but she didn’t necessarily know how to make a great game herself. 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.

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. Sam believed these things as well.

She had resisted returning there because to return to one’s hometown felt like surrender.

“Maybe I’d feel a bit worse if I had killed someone’s pet. A coyote belongs to no one. A coyote is wild. But it’s probably wrong to feel that way. A coyote has as much right to its life as anyone else.”

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

What was a gate anyway? A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.

The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets.

“You can’t know you want something until it’s an option.”

Humans want so much. I am glad to be a bird. In a field of strawberry plants, waxy berries companionably mingle among white flowers.

You are dying. No, that came out wrong. What you meant to express was the existential grief that comes with the knowledge that all things die. You are not dying, except insofar as you have always been dying.

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? So, where were you when this began?

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

A name is destiny, if you think it is.

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

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

“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?”

“The boredom you speak of,” Alabaster said. “It is what most of us call happiness.”

art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.

She looked past the building to the sky. It was a deep, blue velvet night, and the moon hung heavy and supernaturally spherical in the sky. “I wonder who built this engine,” Sadie said. “It’s good work,” Sam said. “The God rays are nicely done, but the moon is almost too beautiful. The scale seems off.” “How is it so large and low? And it needs more texture. A bit of Perlin noise. It should look a little rougher, otherwise it doesn’t seem real.” “But maybe that’s the look they were going for?” “Maybe so.”