Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

To play requires trust and love.

“There is no more intimate act than play, even sex.”

This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”

life is very long, unless it is not.”

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 as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.

“The game character, like the self, is contextual.”

The awareness gave him pause: perhaps a funny-looking mixed-race kid could exist at the center of the world, not just on its periphery.

“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.”

“That love is all there is; is all we know of love. It is enough; the freight should be proportioned to the groove.” What is the “freight”? he wondered. What is the “groove”?

“Sorry, Sam. The universe tortured you because it could, because it will. The enormous polyhedral die in the sky was rolled, and it came up ‘Torture Sam Masur.’ I would have shown up in the game of your life either way.”

but relatively brief, relatively uncomplicated encounters with interesting people could be lovely as well.

“I rather like to be consumed.”

“I devour, and I am devoured,”

Sam did not believe his body could feel anything but pain, and so he did not desire pleasure in the same way that other people seemed to.

Tell me I don’t know you when I could draw both sides of this hand, your hand, from memory. “Sam?” she said.

She had never found his entrances.

people who could be your lover, but, if she was honest with herself, there were relatively few people

keep turning over the problems until I’m not failing anymore.

You fail better.”

But Sadie knew it was easy to get addicted to the taste of your own carnage.

“Enough is…Maybe this is selfish, but I don’t want to love more than I am loved. And I don’t want to be with someone who loves something or someone more than me.”

He was no longer the boy who wanted to taste everything at the buffet, and he considered it a sign of his own maturity

“Maybe the worst part is, I don’t trust myself anymore. I’m not sure my instincts are good.”

is a painting about the creative process—its solitude and the ways in which an artist,

particularly a female one, is expected to disappear. The woman’s slate appears to be blank.

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

Shinto tradition, a gate represented passing from the mundane to the sacred.

She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another.

She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t.)

The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.

The game was one in a long line of spaces between gates.

Computers are great for experimentation, but they’re bad for deep thinking.”

it takes a lot of time to make a piece of art. It isn’t simply design either. You have to understand the fabrics and what they can bear. You have to understand the dyeing process and how to achieve certain colors and what will make the color last through the ages. If you make a mistake, you might have to begin again.”

This fabric is not just a fabric. It’s the story of failure and of perseverance, of the discipline of a craftsman, of the life of an artist.”

Ah, but Sadie Green was a gamer! In a game, if a sign warns you not to open a certain door, you will definitely open that door. If it doesn’t work out, you can always go back to the save point and start again.

Sadie had often reflected that sex and video games had a great deal in common. There were certain objectives that needed to be met.

To be good at sex was to be good at the game of sex.

the feeling that there was the right amount of companionable space between them. I am here with you, his body seemed to say, but I acknowledge that we are separate beings.

She was pretty all the time, but she was beautiful in love. He

He would watch them arrive together, and leave together, and he could imagine the drive, and the jokes, and the references that you only had with the person you shared your life with. And eventually, Sadie would be a stranger. And this would be a disaster for Sam.

Maybe the sex wouldn’t have been exceptional, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Because the other things they had were finer than sex. Because he loved Sadie.

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. It wasn’t her fault. He had had years to figure out the solution, but he’d wasted his time making games with her instead.

The coyotes felt more human than most of the humans Sam encountered, more human than Sam himself felt back then.

“Maybe you should look more goddamn closely at a thing before deciding what it is and running off your mouth.”

Los Angeles, he decided, was a profoundly stupid city, and he felt a palpable, if irrational, longing for all things Massachusetts.

Why was it acceptable for apparently well-meaning people to see the world in such a general way?

“Maybe you need to let more people know you.” “Maybe.”

in business, they call this a pivot. But life is filled with them, too. The most successful people are also the most

able to change their mindsets. You may not ever have a romantic relationship with Sadie, but you two will be friends for the rest of your lives, and that is something of equal or greater value, if you choose to see it that way.”