Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

A truly magnificent thing about the way the brain was coded, Sam thought, was that it could say “Excuse me” while meaning “Screw you.”

Sam looked at Sadie, and he thought, This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently.

Everyone’s work is basic and uninteresting at twenty. But being around Dov made her feel impatient with her twenty-year-old brain and the quality of its ideas.

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.

he had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.

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.

And yet, in K-town, he felt more Korean than he ever had before. Or to put a finer point on it, he felt more aware of the fact that he was a Korean and that that was not necessarily a negative or even a neutral fact about him.

“And this is the truth of any game—it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.”

Sam laughed, not because he was cruel, but because the woman reminded him of his mother, and he could not figure out what else to do with himself when faced with such a gruesome spectacle less than ten steps in front of him.

A glimmer of a notion of a nothing of a whisper of a figment of an idea.

It is the same world, she thought, but I am different. Or is it a different world, but I am the same? For

There are, he determines, infinite ways his mother doesn’t die that night and only one way she does.

Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.

“You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it’s a perfect time for you to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.”

SHOOT a Funeral, SHOOT in my SHOOT Brain

Onstage, in the middle of white Elizabethan England, improbably stands a handsome Asian man as Macbeth. Macbeth has just heard the news that his wife had died, and he is giving the most famous soliloquy from the play, the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech.

She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.