Top 500 Nicola Yoon Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “We think we want all the time in the world with the people we love, but maybe what we need is the opposite. Just a finite amount of time, so we still think the other person is interesting. Maybe we don’t need acts two and three. Maybe love is best in act one.”

— Nicola Yoon

102. “Yes, falling in love requires a leap of faith. But people only jump because they don’t know what the ground looks like. They believe their landing will be soft. That the ground is covered in soft stuff- feathers, down pillows, fluffy baby blankets, the shaggiest shag carpeting. But I’ve seen the ground. It is covered in lethal spikes fashioned fro the bones of other jumpers. The fall is not all survivable.”

— Nicola Yoon

103. “Yes, falling in love requires a leap of faith. But people only jump because they don’t know what the ground looks like.”

— Nicola Yoon

104. “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

105. “I’m sorry that you’re sick.” “It’s not your fault.” “I know, but I wish that I could give you more than this.”

— Nicola Yoon

106. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

108. “How can this be the same day? How can all these people be going about their lives totally oblivious to what’s been happening to mine? Sometimes your world shakes so hard, it’s difficult to imagine that everyone else isn’t feeling it too.”

— Nicola Yoon

109. “I love this part of getting to know someone. How every new piece of information, every new expression, seems magical.”

— Nicola Yoon

110. “This is why people touch. Sometimes words are just not enough.”

— Nicola Yoon

111. “It’s a strange thing to realize that you’re willing to die. It doesn’t come in a flash, a sudden epiphany. It happens slowly, a balloon leak in reverse.”

— Nicola Yoon

112. “Beware the Queen of Hearts. She’ll have your head.”

— Nicola Yoon

113. “Practicality is overrated.”

— Nicola Yoon

114. “I was happy before I met him. But I’m alive now, and those are not the same thing.”

— Nicola Yoon

115. “He looks like a starving man, like he could devour me all at once. “That swimsuit,” he begins. “Is small,” I conclude.”

— Nicola Yoon

116. “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

117. “His eyes are a clear, summer-blue lake that I can’t see the bottom of.”

— Nicola Yoon

118. “Human beings are not reasonable creatures. Instead of being ruled by logic, we are ruled by emotions. The world would be a happier place if the opposite were true. For example, based on a single phone call, I have begun to hope for a miracle. I don’t even believe in God.”

— Nicola Yoon

119. “He was going to get the American Dream that even Americans dream about.”

— Nicola Yoon

120. “The only thing I know for sure is that this, being here with Olly, being able to love him and be loved by him, is everything.”

— Nicola Yoon

121. “Words, Natasha thinks, should behave more like units of measure. A meter is a meter is a meter. Words shouldn’t be allowed to change meanings. Who decides that the meaning has changed, and when? Is there an in-between time when the word means both things? Or a time when the word doesn’t mean anything at all?”

— Nicola Yoon

122. “I understand. Really I do. But there’s part of me, the part that doesn’t believe in God or true love, that really wants him to prove me wrong about not believing in those things. I want him to choose me. Even though it’s way too early in the history of us.”

— Nicola Yoon

123. “Every day you get up and learn something new. Every day you find something to be happy about. Every single day you have a smile for me.”

— Nicola Yoon

124. “Some prescient part of him saw the two paths diverging in the yellow wood. Maybe if he’d chosen the other path, if he’d left the store instead of stayed, it would’ve made all the difference.”

— Nicola Yoon

125. “How can you trust something that can end as suddenly as it begins?”

— Nicola Yoon

126. “You’re just looking for someone to save you. Save yourself.”

— Nicola Yoon

127. “I love the way she seems to feel things with her entire body. I wonder why a girl who is so obviously passionate is so adamantly against passion.”

— Nicola Yoon

128. “Chaos theory says that even a small change in initial conditions can lead to wildly unpredictable results. A butterfly flaps her wings now and a hurricane forms in the future. Still. I think if I could just find the moment, I could take it apart piece by piece, molecule by molecule, until I got down to the atomic level, until I got to the part that was inviolate and essential. If I could take it apart and understand it then maybe I could make just exactly the right change.”

— Nicola Yoon

129. “Rejection was like sandpaper.”

— Nicola Yoon

130. “Books don’t work their magic on me anymore. It used to be that if I was in a funk or in the barren hinterland between sad and mad, I could just pluck any random one from my favorites shelf and settle into my fuzzy pink chair for a good read. By chapter three – chapter four at the very latest – I’d be feeling better.”

— Nicola Yoon

131. “I know there’s a better way for me to tell her this, but I’m not feeling like my best self right now.”

— Nicola Yoon

132. “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

133. “Sometimes if you look a word up in the dictionary, you’ll see some definitions marked as obsolete. Natasha often wonders about this, how language can be slippery. A word can start off meaning one thing and end up meaning another.”

— Nicola Yoon

134. “Being alone with her in a dimly lit room is a little bit of heaven.”

— Nicola Yoon

135. “Sometime the world reveals itself to you.”

— Nicola Yoon

136. “All teenagers separate from their parents. To grow up is to grow apart.”

— Nicola Yoon

137. “We tell ourselves there are reasons for the things that happen, but we are just telling ourselves stories. We make them up. They don’t mean anything.”

— Nicola Yoon

138. “We look at each other and laugh for no reason. Or, not for no reason, but because the world just then seems extraordinary. For us to have met, to have fallen in love, to get to be together is beyond anything either of us had ever thought possible.”

— Nicola Yoon

139. “In my white room, against my white walls, on my glistening white bookshelves, book spines provide the only color. The books are all brand-new hardcovers – no germy secondhand softcovers for me. They come to me from Outside, decontaminated and vacuum-sealed in plastic wrap. I.”

— Nicola Yoon

140. “His eyes drift across my face as if he’s trying to remember something. “Why do I feel like I’ve always known you?” he asks.”

— Nicola Yoon

141. “The distance between who they were and who they are is so wide, we have no hope of getting them back.”

— Nicola Yoon

142. “C’era una volta una ragazza la cui vita era tutta una menzogna.”

— Nicola Yoon

143. “I wonder if she realizes how passionate she is about not being passionate.”

— Nicola Yoon

144. “Natasha doesn’t say what she suspects. That meant to be doesn’t have to mean forever.”

— Nicola Yoon

145. “Still, getting over him didn’t take that long at all. And that’s the thing that makes me wary. Where did all those feelings go? People spend their whole lives looking for love. Poems and songs and entire novels are written about it. But how can you trust something that can end as suddenly as it begins?”

— Nicola Yoon

146. “Aside from my mom, Carla, and my tutors, the world barely know I exist. I mean, I exist online. I have online friends and my Tumblr book reviews, but that’s not the same as being a real person who can be visited by strange boys bearing Bundt cakes.”

— Nicola Yoon

147. “Words, Natasha thinks, should behave more like units of measure. A meter is a meter is a meter. Words shouldn’t be allowed to change meanings.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

149. “Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”

— Nicola Yoon

150. “Trying not to smile only makes you smile more.”

— Nicola Yoon