Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

Unless they were unreliable or clearly established as lunatics or scoundrels, characters in novels, movies, and games were meant to be taken at face value—the totality of what they did or what they said. But people—the ordinary, the decent and basically honest—couldn’t get through the day without that one indispensable bit of programming that allowed you to say one thing and mean, feel, even do, another.

This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.

“You’re incredibly gifted, Sam. But it is worth noting that to be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.”

“A maze,” he would say, “is a video game distilled to its purest form.”

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

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.

Beauty, after all, is almost always a matter of angles and resolve. Urban renewal projects were accomplished so frantically it seemed like time-lapse photography. Stadiums built, hotels refurbished, decrepit buildings detonated, flora planted, less appealing native flora removed, roads paved, bus routes added, uniforms created, musicians recruited, dancers hired, corporate sponsors slapped on any surface that would receive a logo, graffiti painted over, homeless discreetly relocated, coyotes euthanized, bribes paid; deeper schisms around race and class momentarily tabled because company was coming!

“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!

Sadie felt a swelling of love and of worry for him—what was the difference in the end? It was never worth worrying about someone you didn’t love. And it wasn’t love if you didn’t worry.

Sometimes, she didn’t even like him, but the truth was, she didn’t know if an idea was worth pursuing until it had made its way through Sam’s brain, too. It was only when Sam said her own idea back to her—slightly modified, improved, synthesized, rearranged—that she could tell if it was good.

“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.”

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

“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?”