Top 500 Nicola Yoon Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Of all the ways today could’ve gone, I couldn’t have predicted this. But now I’m sure that everything that’s happened today has been leading me to her and us to this moment and this moment to the rest of our lives.”

— Nicola Yoon

102. “I know for sure that I will always compare every city skyline to New York’s. Just as I will always compare every boy to Daniel.”

— Nicola Yoon

103. “My father’s,” she says, smiling. “He used to think I was the greatest thing ever.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

106. “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

107. “Time moves in both directions – forward and backwards- and what happens here and now changes them both.”

— Nicola Yoon

108. “Sometimes you do things for the right reasons and sometimes for the wrong ones and sometimes it’s impossible to tell“Sometimes you do things for the right reasons and sometimes for the wrong ones and sometimes it’s impossible to tell the difference.”

— Nicola Yoon

109. “A little angst never hurt anyone.”

— Nicola Yoon

110. “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

111. “That night, I dream that the house breathes with me. I exhale and the walls contract like a pinpricked balloon, crushing me as it deflates. I inhale and the walls expand. A single breath more and my life will finally, finally explode.”

— Nicola Yoon

112. “Even I’m surprised by how much I’ve been feeling for her all day. The thing about falling is you don’t have any control on your way down. I.”

— Nicola Yoon

113. “Not everybody can dance good, but everybody can dance.”

— Nicola Yoon

114. “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

115. “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

116. “Immigrating to a new country is an act of hope, bravery, and, sometimes, desperation. I’d like to say a big thank-you to all the people who’ve made long journeys to distant shores for whatever reason. May you find what you’re looking for. Always know that the country of your destination is better for having you in it.”

— Nicola Yoon

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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. “I wish again that I could talk to my mom about this. I want to ask her why I get breathless when I think of him. I want to share my giddiness with her. I want to tell her all the funny things Olly says. I want to tell her how I can’t make myself stop thinking about him even though I try. I want to ask her if this is the way she felt about Dad at the beginning.”

— Nicola Yoon

122. “You deserve a little something.”

— Nicola Yoon

123. “The ocean will swallow you whole and burp you out and not notice you were even there.”

— Nicola Yoon

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

127. “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

128. “I am really not a girl to fall in love with. For one thing, I don’t like temporary, nonprovable things, and romantic love is both temporary and nonprovable.”

— Nicola Yoon

129. “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

130. “You’re not your dad,” I say, but he doesn’t believe me. I understand his fear. Who are we if not a product of our parents and their histories?”

— Nicola Yoon

131. “My heart is too bruised and I want to keep the pain as a reminder. I don’t want sunlight on it. I don’t want it to heal. Because if it does, I might be tempted to use it again.”

— Nicola Yoon

132. “One thing I’m certain of: Wanting just leads to more wanting. There’s no end to desire.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

135. “When Natasha thinks about love, this is what she thinks: nothing lasts forever. Like hydrogen-7 or lithium-5 or boron-7, love has an infinitesimally small half-life that decays to nothing. And when its gone, its like it was never there at all.”

— Nicola Yoon

136. “Maya Angelou wrote in Human Family, “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”

— Nicola Yoon

137. “Observable Fact: People aren’t logical.”

— Nicola Yoon

138. “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

139. “How is it possible to have an emotion and its opposite at the same time?”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

141. “You can’t just make people fall in love, right? Love is way more complicated than that. It’s not just a matter of choosing a couple of people and making them ask each other some questions, and then love blossoms. The moon and the stars are involved. I’m certain of it.”

— Nicola Yoon

142. “You’re all the good things wrapped into one good thing.”

— Nicola Yoon

143. “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

144. “Sometimes you fall off prematurely. Sometimes you get so damaged by other pieces of luggage falling on your head that you don’t really function anymore. Sometimes you get lost or forgotten and go around forever and ever.”

— Nicola Yoon

145. “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

146. “Practicality is overrated.”

— Nicola Yoon

147. “You poets are obsessed with stars. Falling stars. Shooting stars. Dying stars.”

— Nicola Yoon

148. “For most immigrants, moving to the new country is an act of faith. Even if you’ve heard stories of safety, opportunity, and prosperity, it’s still a leap to remove yourself from your own language, people, and country. Your own history. What if the stories weren’t true? What if you couldn’t adapt? What if you weren’t wanted in the new country?”

— Nicola Yoon

149. “I’m on my way home. I’ll remain trapped there forever. I’m alive and don’t want to be.”

— Nicola Yoon

150. “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