Top 500 Nicola Yoon Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “I was happy before I met him. But I’m alive now, and those are not the same thing.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

103. “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

104. “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

105. “Sincerity is sexy, and my cynical heart notices.”

— Nicola Yoon

106. “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.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

108. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

110. “No one wants to believe that life is random. My dad says he doesn’t know where my cynicism comes from, but I’m not a cynic. I am a realist. 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

111. “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

112. “From the edge of space I can see the whole world all 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 there. For the first time in a long time, I want more than I have.”

— Nicola Yoon

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

118. “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

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. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

122. “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

123. “You deserve a little something.”

— 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. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

131. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

134. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

136. “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

137. “Practicality is overrated.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— 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. “Love makes people crazy. Loss of love makes people crazy.”

— Nicola Yoon

141. “Aveces las cosas que se mezclan no se pueden volver a separar, por mucho que uno quiera hacerlo.”

— Nicola Yoon

142. “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

143. “I read once that, on average, we replace the majority of our cells every seven years. Even more amazing: we change the upper layers of our skin every two weeks. If all the cells in our body did this, we’d be immortal. But some of our cells, like the ones in our brains, don’t renew. They age, and age us. In two weeks my skin will have no memory of Olly’s hand on mine, but my brain will remember. We can have immortality or the memory of touch. But we can’t have both.”

— Nicola Yoon

144. “Love can kill you and I’d rather be alive than out there living.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

146. “I love you, Maddy.” “I love you, Olly. I loved you before I knew you.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

148. “I wanted you and the whole wide world. I wanted everything.”

— Nicola Yoon

149. “It’s weird to miss something you’ve never had – or don’t remember having, anyway.”

— Nicola Yoon

150. “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