Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

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. Many

You would think women would want to stick together when there weren’t that many of them, but they never did. It was as if being a woman was a disease that you didn’t wish to catch.

As much in love as she was with Dov, Sadie was already imagining a future that didn’t have him in it.

Everyone’s work is basic and uninteresting at twenty.

this was what it was like to play someone else’s game: to have the illusion of choice, without actual choice.

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.”

If someone tells you there will be trouble, believe them.

It is worth noting that greatness for Sam and Sadie meant different things. To oversimplify: For Sam, greatness meant popular. For Sadie, art.

I want to make something that will make people happy.”

It’s more than romantic. It’s better than romance.

Marx’s usual relationship lasted around six. Marx was great at being in love, for a bit, and certainly, no one ever left a relationship with Marx feeling abused or hurt.

To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could.

Sadie was like Sam, but she was not Sam, and this was deeply attractive to him.

Marx was a prodigious reader, and he felt like Sadie might be the kind of book that one could read many times, and always come away with something new.

anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken.

The universe, he felt, was just—or if not just, fair enough. It might take your mother, but it might give you someone else in return.

to return to one’s hometown felt like surrender.

To return to the city of one’s birth always felt like retreat.

they had become instant best friends in the way people can in their twenties.

“Because we never say anything real to each other. We play games, and we talk

about games, and we talk about making games, and we don’t know each other at all.”

“But you don’t love me enough,” she said.

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

“I love Sadie Green,” Sam said helplessly.

“I might have loved you once,” Sam said. “And I’ll always care for you in my way, but we wouldn’t work together. I’ve known that for years.”

wasn’t there always some game Sam was playing? Wasn’t there always some maze for her to solve? He was an exhausting person.

The best colors of Sadie are not her darkness.”

“I don’t know, Sam. I think all her colors are worth exploring.

Sam couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been the first to know about one of Sadie’s ideas.

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.

“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?”

“To make a game is to imagine the person playing it.”

there will never be a person who can mean as much to you as Sam.

To build a world for someone seems a romantic thing from where I stand.” Dov shook his head. “Sam Masur, that fucked-up, romantic kid.”

After five years, she could finally hear Marx’s name and not feel like weeping.

“Why do you think we never got together?” Sadie sat next to Sam on the bed. “Sammy,” she said. “We were together. You must know that. When I’m honest with myself, the most important parts of me were yours.”

“Because I loved working with you better than I liked the idea of making love to you. Because true collaborators in this life are rare.”