Top 500 Nicola Yoon Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “My guilt is an ocean for me to drown in.”

— Nicola Yoon

52. “He says they’re not his type, but I don’t really get the concept of having a type. My type is girls. All of them. Why would I limit my dating pool?”

— Nicola Yoon

53. “Just because you can’t experience everything doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experience anything.”

— Nicola Yoon

54. “Sometimes your world shakes so hard, it’s difficult to imagine that everyone else isn’t feeling it too.”

— Nicola Yoon

55. “Everyone’s a snowflake, right? We’re all unique and complicated. We can never know the human heart, and all that.”

— Nicola Yoon

56. “Doesn’t that book always make you cry?” “One day it won’t,” I say. “I want to be sure to be reading it on that day.”

— Nicola Yoon

57. “Love is everything. Everything.”

— Nicola Yoon

58. “The thing about falling is you don’t have any control on your way down.”

— Nicola Yoon

59. “Maybe it’s better to end things this way. Better to have a tragic and sudden end than to have a long, drawn-out one where we realize that we’re just too different, and that love alone is not enough to bind us. I think all these things. I believe none of them.”

— Nicola Yoon

60. “The trouble with getting your hopes too far up is: it’s a long way down.”

— Nicola Yoon

61. “I am made. I am unmade.”

— Nicola Yoon

62. “I know there’s no such thing as meant-to-be, and yet here I am wondering if maybe I’ve been wrong.”

— Nicola Yoon

63. “America’s not really a melting pot. It’s more like one of those divided metal plates with separate sections for starch, meat, and veggies.”

— Nicola Yoon

64. “It’s hard to love someone who doesn’t love you back.”

— Nicola Yoon

65. “He said that love and dark matter were the same – the only thing that kept the universe from flying apart.”

— Nicola Yoon

66. “We have big, beautiful brains. We invent things that fly. Fly. We write poetry. You probably hate poetry, but it’s hard to argue with ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate’ in terms of sheer beauty. We are capable of big lives. A big history. Why settle? Why choose the practical thing, the mundane thing? We are born to dream and make the things we dream about.”

— Nicola Yoon

67. “Hearts don’t break. They just stop working. An old watch from another time and no parts to fix it.”

— Nicola Yoon

68. “Some people exist in your life to make it better. Some people exist to make it worse.”

— Nicola Yoon

69. “He was some exotic planet and I was his favorite satellite. But he’s no planet, just the final fading light of an already dead star. And I’m not a satellite. I’m space junk, hurtling as far as I can away from him.”

— Nicola Yoon

70. “A universe that can wink into existence can wink out again.”

— Nicola Yoon

71. “It’s better to see life as it is, not as you wish it to be. Things don’t happen for a reason. They just happen.”

— Nicola Yoon

72. “We are born to dream and make the things we dream about.”

— Nicola Yoon

73. “Even though I hate poetry, a poem I read for English class pops into my head. “Hope” is the thing with feathers. I understand concretely what that means now. Something inside my chest wants to fly out, wants to sing and laugh and dance with relief. I.”

— Nicola Yoon

74. “Doomed love is a part of life.”

— Nicola Yoon

75. “If the person who’s meant to love you forever can suddenly stop, then what is there to believe in?”

— Nicola Yoon

76. “To be clear: I don’t believe in fate. But I’m desperate.”

— Nicola Yoon

77. “Why would you throw your future away for temporary things that you only want right now?”

— Nicola Yoon

78. “Why not more poems about the sun? The sun is also a star, and it’s our most important one. That alone should be worth a poem or two.”

— Nicola Yoon

79. “Safety is not everything. There’s more to life than being alive.”

— Nicola Yoon

80. “Hearts don’t break. It’s just another thing poets say. Hearts are not made of glass or bone or any material that could splinter or fragment or shatter. They don’t crack into pieces. They don’t fall apart. Hearts don’t break. They just stop working.”

— Nicola Yoon

81. “I know all these things. I know them the way I know that Polaris, the North Star, is not actually the brightest star in the sky – it’s the fiftieth.”

— Nicola Yoon

82. “I keep picturing myself floating high above the earth. From the edge of space, I can see the whole world at once. My eyes don’t have to stop at a wall or at a door. I can see the beginning and the end of time. I can see infinity from here.”

— Nicola Yoon

83. “People just want to believe. Otherwise they would have to admit that life is just a random series of good and bad things that happen until one day you die.”

— Nicola Yoon

84. “It’s not that Natasha wants to let Daniel go; it’s that she has to let go. It isn’t possible for her to live in two worlds simultaneously, heart in one place, body in another. She lets go of Daniel to avoid being ripped apart.”

— Nicola Yoon

85. “No one needs to get bruised up falling in love. I just want to fall the way everybody else gets to.”

— Nicola Yoon

86. “Observable Fact: I don’t believe in magic. Observable Fact: We are magic.”

— Nicola Yoon

87. “Before these buildings were buildings, they were just the skeletons of them. Before they were skeletons, they were cross-beams and girders. Metal and glass and concrete. And before that, they were construction plans. Before that, architectural plans. And before that, just an idea someone had for the making of a city.”

— Nicola Yoon

88. “Ever since Olly came into my life there’ve been two Maddys: the one who lives through books and doesn’t want to die, and the one who lives and suspects that death will be a small price to pay for it.”

— Nicola Yoon

89. “He’s tired, but not the kind of tired that sleeping can fix.”

— Nicola Yoon

90. “A little angst never hurt anyone.”

— Nicola Yoon

91. “But I have a strange and happy feeling that I can’t quite describe. It’s like knowing all the words to a song but still finding them beautiful and surprising.”

— Nicola Yoon

92. “I kiss him to get him to stop talking. If he keeps talking I will love him, and I don’t want to love him. I really don’t. As strategies go, it’s not my finest. Kissing is just another way of talking except without the words.”

— Nicola Yoon

93. “I am not lonely, Mom,” I snap. “I am alone. Those are different things.”

— Nicola Yoon

94. “I’ve never really understood the phrase they have chemistry before now. After all, everything is chemistry. Everything is combination and reaction. The atoms in my body align themselves with the atoms in his.”

— Nicola Yoon

95. “La vida es un regalo no la desprecies.”

— Nicola Yoon

96. “They don’t know what poor is. They don’t know that poverty is a sharp knife carving away at you. They don’t know what it does to the body. To a mind.”

— Nicola Yoon

97. “Karaoke is itself the Japanese work for embarrassing oneself by singing in front of a room filled with strangers who are only there to laugh at you.”

— Nicola Yoon

98. “In my head I know I’ve been in love before, but it doesn’t feel like it. Being in love with you is better than the first time. It feels like the first time and the last time and the only time all at once.”

— Nicola Yoon

99. “Observable Fact: Families are the worst.”

— Nicola Yoon

100. “We pass a woman shaking her head and slapping at the steering wheel with her hands. Only after we’ve passed her do I figure out that she was probably dancing to music.”

— Nicola Yoon