Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

He loved the things he loved, and he made no secret of what those things were. And in the end, she attributed Marx’s inertia to a touching, if naive, devotion to Sam.

It was easy to dislike the man; it was harder to dislike the little boy who existed just below the surface of the man.

“That’s why he’s always dating someone new. He gets bored with people, but it’s not about them, it’s because he’s boring.”

“It’s not cruel to state a fact.”

“It isn’t a fact. And sometimes, it is cruel to state a fact.”

He’s not Achilles. Marx is boring like Hector, so he ate that shit up.”

‘Tamer of horses’ is an honest profession. The lines mean that one doesn’t have to be a god or a king for your life to have meaning.”

The best colors of Sadie are not her darkness.”

Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty.

“You can’t know you want something until it’s an option.”

‘Zweisamkeit’ is the feeling of being alone even when you’re with other people.”

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.”

“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.”

Unobserved, a graying man watches two teenagers swim in a pond. You can smell the man’s longing, stronger than lavender, and you think, Humans want so much. I am glad

to be a bird. In a field of strawberry plants, waxy berries companionably mingle among white flowers.

Surrender to the air, enjoy the view.

Your wing is flapping. You choose to interpret this as an attempt at flight, and not an involuntary death spasm.

What you meant to express was the existential grief that comes with the knowledge that all things die. You are not dying, except insofar as you have always been dying.

You have had many lives. Before you were a tamer of horses, you were a fencer, a high school chess champion, an actor. You are American, Japanese, Korean, and by being all of those things, you are not truly any of those things. You consider yourself a citizen of the world.

Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion:

One of the absolute best parts of your own job is being able to tell an artist, Yes. I see you. I get what you’re doing. Let’s do this thing.

If you weren’t here, it would be someone else. You’re a tamer of horses. You’re an NPC, Marx.”

An NPC is a character that is not playable by a gamer. It is an AI extra that gives a programmed world verisimilitude.

But the fact is, there is no game without the NPCs.

“No. People don’t belong to each other.” “Why not?” Sam says. “Why not?” “Sam.” “Are you going to marry her?” Sam asks. He says “marry” like he means “murder.”

“Because there is life, and there is work,” you say. “And they aren’t the same.” “They’re the same for me.” “Maybe they’re not the same for Sadie.”

It is strange, you think, how much people hate going to doctors, but how much they love watching shows about doctors.

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.

How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky? But

I knew your mother so well I could play her part. The same with my own mother and my grandmother and my childhood best friend, Euna, who drowned in the lake by her cousin’s house. There are no ghosts, but up here”—she gestured toward her head—“it’s a haunted house.”

“You’re kidding, right? God, I miss Marx. Hmm, why throw a party? I don’t know, we finished the game. We survived the last year. They tried to kill us, they nearly broke us, but we’re still bloody here! Why does anyone ever throw a party?”

“What’s better than work?” He paused. “What’s worse than work?”

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

“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.”

A rogue and peasant slave to reality,” Alabaster said. “I suppose we drink and we smoke for the same reasons it is done elsewhere. We must fill our infinite days with something.”

have heard told there is much money to be made in amusements.”

have had it my whole life. But when I feel that pain, I am incapacitated by it, and I am certain that I can’t go on.”

“A programmer is a diviner of possible outcomes, and a seer of unseen worlds.”

I have found that the most intimate relationships allow for a great deal of privacy within them.”

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. And I suppose I came to Friendship because I no longer wished to be in the place I lived and sometimes I no longer wished to even be in my body.” “What is meant by ‘partner’?

I think we could help each other. Sorrows can be shared, as easily as games of Go.”

“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.”

“No, it’s nothing to fear. It’s just the end.”

There is no purity to bearing pain alone.

“is the rarity of finding a playmate in either this world or the other world.”

Sadie had willed herself to be great: art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.

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.”

Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.

It’s so easy to make a hit when you’re young and you don’t know anything.”