Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

“There is no more intimate act than play, even sex.” The internet responded: no one who had had good sex would ever say that, and there must be something seriously wrong with Sam.

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

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

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. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

Sam blew out ten candles, and in the distance, Mary Lou Retton received a perfect 10 on her floor routine. And he almost felt like he, by blowing out the ten candles at the precise moment that he had, had been what caused her to get the perfect 10. He fantasized that the universe was a Rube Goldberg machine. If he had blown out only nine candles, maybe the Romanian girl would have won instead.

“The child’s body moves the way a body can move before it has felt or even encountered the idea of pain.” Oh, the ambitions of design documents!

We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen.

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

“The good news is that the pain is in your head.” But I am in my head, Sam thought.

Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.

“I call it afternoon music. You don’t want to listen to it too early in the day, or the day’ll be lost to you.”

wrapping her fingers around the cylindrical chamber of blood sponges that was his (and every) penis.

“How do you get over a failure?” “I think you mean a public failure. Because we all fail in private.

“What’s Torschlusspanik?” Sam said. “It means ‘gate-shut panic,’ ” Simon said. “It’s the fear that time is running out and that you’re going to miss an opportunity. Literally, the gate is closing, and you’ll never get in.”

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.

Sam did not think of it as a disability—other people had disabilities; Sam had “the thing with my foot.”

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

“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?”

If you’re always aiming for perfection, you won’t make anything at all.

Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.

The thing I find profoundly hopeful when I’m feeling despair is to imagine people playing, to believe that no matter how bad the world gets, there will always be players.”

“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.”