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This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently.
This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”
It’s more than romantic. It’s better than romance. It’s friendship.”
he felt like Sadie might be the kind of book that one could read many times, and always come away with something new.
This is very romantic to me
“Marx never met a genius he didn’t want to sleep with.”
Smart man
There is love here,
I am absolutely obsessed with this author's portrayal of friendship
He was an expert in her moods and colors.
Thinking of this and looking at the little paperweight, Sam’s heart swelled with love for Sadie. Why was it so hard for him to say he loved her even when she said it to him? He knew he loved her. People who felt far less for each other said “love” all the time, and it didn’t mean a thing. And maybe that was the point. He more than loved Sadie Green. There needed to be another word for it.
There are, he determines, infinite ways his mother doesn’t die that night and only one way she does.
“The good news is that the pain is in your head.” But I am in my head, Sam thought.
He had slept with one boy and three girls.
Bisexual king
Zoe kissed Sadie on the mouth.
Oh!!!!
Marx sighed, as if resigning himself to something. “I love you, Sadie,”
Sadie had been in bed for eleven days when Sam showed up in her room, demanding to talk about Solution.
Parallels to Sadie making Sam talk at the hospital
no two people had ever shared more of their lives together. That if she didn’t know him, no one knew him, and he might as well not exist.
Sam looked at her outstretched hand, which he knew as well as any hand except his own—the precise pattern of the lines that made up the grid of her palm, the slim fingers with the purplish veins at the knuckles, the particular creamy olive hue of her skin, her delicate wrist, pinkish, with a penumbral callus that must have come from Dov, the white gold bracelet she wore that he knew had been a gift from Freda on her twelfth birthday. How could she honestly think he wouldn’t know about the handcuffs? He had spent hours sitting next to her, playing games and then making them, staring at her
...more
This might be the most romantic thing ive ever read
But Sam had always been so guarded—he was a boy, and also a windowless and doorless tower. She had never found his entrances.
it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another.
Symbolic
How nice it was to have Marx waiting for her.
This also feels symbolic
A gate and a gate and a gate. And at the end of all the gates, Marx. Marx, in a white linen shirt and rolled-up khakis and a silly straw fedora that Zoe had bought him at the Rose Bowl Flea Market. He takes off the hat, and he tips it to her.
he loved Sadie. It was one of only a handful of things that he knew to be a constant about himself. The greatest pleasures of his life had been when he was by her side, playing or inventing. And how could she not feel that as well? There would never be another Sadie, and now this one was lost to him.
‘Zweisamkeit’ is the feeling of being alone even when you’re with other people.” Simon turned to look in his husband’s eyes. “Before I met you, I felt this constantly. I felt it with my family, my friends, and every boyfriend I ever had. I felt it so often that I thought this was the nature of living. To be alive was to accept that you were fundamentally alone.” Simon’s eyes were moist. “I know I’m impossible, and I know you don’t care about German words or marriage. All I can say is, I love you and thank you for marrying me anyway.”
This is fucking beautiful
You take his head in your hands and you kiss him on the crown.
Their intimacy makes me cry
“Anna,” she says. “That’s my mother’s name,” Sam says. “Marx never mentioned that our mothers had the same first name. I thought you had a different name.” Your mother explains, “AeRan is my Korean name. When I’m in the U.S., everyone calls me Anna.” “Anna Watanabe.” “Watanabe is my husband’s name. I’m Anna Lee.” “Anna Lee was my mother’s name, too,” Sam says.
Brothers
When you figured out Sam’s dead mother’s name, you decided that it was fate, and from that day forward, Sam would be your brother. A name is destiny, if you think it is.
Crying
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.
This is the book at its core
his partner.
I think the use of "partner" throughout this book is notable
s., tell me your thoughts. —m.
Could be Sam or Sadie
It begins to seem to me that life is little more than a series of losses, and as you must know by now, I hate losing.
He was my friend. He was my partner.
Emo
There is no purity to bearing pain alone.
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.”
For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. 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.
Emo
“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.”
