Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can.

To play requires trust and love.

To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.

“Promise me, we won’t ever do this again,” Sadie said. “Promise me, that no matter what happens, no matter what dumb thing we supposedly perpetrate on each other, we won’t ever go six years without talking to each other. Promise me you’ll always forgive me, and I promise I’ll always forgive you.” 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.

had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.

How do you preserve the impossible to preserve? Or, in other words, how do you stop time and death? Could there have been a more propitious

People once made glass sculptures of decay, and they put these sculptures in museums. How strange and beautiful human beings are. And how fragile.

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.

It is worth noting that greatness for Sam and Sadie meant different things. To oversimplify: For Sam, greatness meant popular. For Sadie, art.

The best part of this moment, he thought, is that everything is still possible.

Other people’s parents are often a delight.

And what is the alternative to appropriation? kotaku: I don’t know. mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.

Beauty, after all, is almost always a matter of angles and resolve.

“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.”

“You can watch if you want. I’m going to play until the end of this life.” “That’s a good philosophy,”

She liked working. She liked that she was good at her work, and she felt proud of the fact that she was well paid for it. She felt pleasure in orderly things—a perfectly efficient section of code, a closet where every item was in its place. She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable. She liked hotel rooms, thick towels, cashmere sweaters, silk dresses, oxfords, brunch, fine stationery, overpriced conditioner, bouquets of gerbera, hats, postage stamps, art monographs, maranta plants, PBS documentaries, challah, soy candles, and yoga. She liked receiving a canvas tote bag when she gave to a charitable cause. She was an avid reader (of fiction and nonfiction), but she never read the newspaper, other than the arts sections, and she felt guilty about this.

When she looked at him, she saw Sam, but she also saw Ichigo and Alice and Freda and Marx and Dov and all the mistakes she had made, and all her secret shames and fears, and all the best things she had done, too.

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

Sadie loved clean, bright things, and she felt hopeful.

Throughout his life, Sam had hated being told to “fight,” as if sickness were a character failing. Illness could not be defeated, no matter how hard you fought, and pain, once it had you in its grasp, was transformational.

the cherry blossoms are not the subject; it is a painting about the creative process—its solitude and the ways in which an artist, particularly a female one, is expected to disappear.

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

But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through.

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.”

The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets.

You are no expert, but what you know is this: No human has ever been murdered with a video game weapon.

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.

We work through our pain. That’s what we do. We put the pain into the work, and the work becomes better.

“What is a game?” Marx said. “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.”

“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 their traumas are the most interesting things about them, how do they get over any of it?”

“The world of infinite restarts.