Top 500 Nicola Yoon Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “With that he takes a few steps backward and executes a perfect backflip. My poor shocked heart does the same thing, though a little less perfectly.”

— Nicola Yoon

202. “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.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

204. “There are entire worlds that exist just beneath our notice of them.”

— Nicola Yoon

205. “To make a thing as simple as an apple pie, you have to create the whole wide world.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

207. “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

208. “Do you think it’s funny that both of our favorite memories are about the people we like the least now?” I ask. “Maybe that’s why we dislike them,” she says. “The distance between who they were and who they are is so wide, we have no hope of getting them back.”

— Nicola Yoon

209. “For every event at the quantum level, the current universe splits into multiple universes. This means that for every choice you make, an infinite number of universes exist in which you made a different choice.”

— Nicola Yoon

210. “Does he really need me to tell him that all the seconds matter? That our own universe exploded into existence in the space of a breath?”

— Nicola Yoon

211. “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

212. “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

213. “The problem is chaos theory. There are too many inputs to the formula and even the small ones matter more than you think. And you can never measure them precisely enough. But! If you could, you could write a formula to predict the weather, the future, people.”

— Nicola Yoon

214. “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

215. “And she’s not wrong.”

— Nicola Yoon

216. “The problem with broken hearts isn’t that they kill you. It’s that they don’t.”

— Nicola Yoon

217. “Couples in love believe they’ll always be in love. It’s one of the ways you know you’re in love in the first place.”

— Nicola Yoon

218. “I dream that I run away from home taking the bot I love with me. I dream that I saw the ocean and it was endless and that I could not find the end of it. I dream that I fall asleep in an unquiet room with the boy that loves me and that I dream that I’ve run away from home taking the boy I love with me. I dream that I saw the ocean and it was endless and I could not find the end of it. I dream that I fall asleep in an unquiet room and that I dream about the life I’m already living.”

— Nicola Yoon

219. “How can he not share his newfound joy with his fellow man? And it is joy. There’s a pure kind of joy in the certainty of belief. The certainty that your life has purpose and meaning. That, though your earthly life may be hard, there’s a better place in your future, and God has a plan to get you there. That all the things that have happened to him, even the bad, have happened for a reason.”

— Nicola Yoon

220. “In the end, she chose both. Korean and American. American and Korean. So they would know where they were from. So they would know where they were going.”

— Nicola Yoon

221. “Before him my life was a palindrome – the same forward and backward, like “A man, a plan, a canal. Panama,” or “Madam, I’m Adam.” But Olly’s like a random letter, the big bold X thrown in the middle of the word or phrase that ruins the sequence.”

— Nicola Yoon

222. “When I was younger, one of my favorite activities was imagining alternative-universe versions of myself. Sometimes I was a rosy-cheeked outdoorsy girl who ate flowers and hiked alone, uphill, for miles. Or I was a skydiving, drag-racing, adrenaline-fueled daredevil. Or a chain mail-wearing, sword swinging dragon slayer. It was fun to imagine those things because I already knew who I was. Now I don’t know anything. I don’t know who I’m supposed to be in my new world.”

— Nicola Yoon

223. “Having dreams never killed anybody.”

— Nicola Yoon

224. “And now my life doesn’t make sense anymore. I almost wish I hadn’t met him. How am I supposed to go back to my old life, my days stretching out before me with unending and brutal sameness? How am I supposed to go back to being The Girl Who Reads? Not that I begrudge my life in books. All I know about the world I’ve learned from them. But a description of a tree is not a tree, and a thousand paper kisses will never equal the feel of Olly’s lips against mine.”

— Nicola Yoon

225. “It’s not that Daniel wants to let Natasha go. He holds on for as long as he can. But he hearts the strain in her voice across the distance. In her new accent, he hears the cadence of her slipping away from him.”

— Nicola Yoon

226. “My butterflies are rioting.”

— Nicola Yoon

227. “It’s like knowing all the word to a song but still finding them beautiful and surprising.”

— Nicola Yoon

228. “This is the life you’re living. It’s not temporary, it’s not pretend, and there’s no do-over.”

— Nicola Yoon

229. “Mom said just because a thing ends doesn’t make the thing any less real. Just because everything is different now doesn’t mean we didn’t love each other once. Maybe we will again.”

— Nicola Yoon

230. “Once they met, the rest of it, the love between them, was inevitable.”

— Nicola Yoon

231. “Who are we if not a product of our parents and their histories?”

— Nicola Yoon

232. “You can get lost in you own mind, like you gone to another country. All you thoughts in another language and you can’t read the signs even though they everywhere all around you.”

— Nicola Yoon

233. “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

234. “In Cobain’s lyrics she finally finds the words. She writes a suicide note addressed to no one: “Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.”

— Nicola Yoon

235. “Some things you just have to experience for yourself.”

— Nicola Yoon

236. “You should try it again. The meaning changes every time you read it.”

— Nicola Yoon

237. “It’s not your fault. Life is a gift. Don’t forget to live it.”

— Nicola Yoon

238. “You listened to Bob Marley, and a bartender got you some pot, and someone told you what irie means, and you think you know something. You saw a tiki bar and a beach and your hotel room. That is not a country. That is a resort.”

— Nicola Yoon

239. “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

240. “We are programmed to plan ahead. It’s part of our rhythm. The sun rises every day and defers to the moon every night.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

242. “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.”

— Nicola Yoon

243. “What does it mean to wear your hair natural versus straightened? Is straightening your hair a form of self-hatred? Does it mean you think your hair in its natural state is not beautiful? If you wear your hair naturally, are you making a political statement, claiming black power?”

— Nicola Yoon

244. “One of the hazards of having friends, especially long time ones, is just how well they know you.”

— Nicola Yoon

245. “He thinks of poverty as a kind of contagion, and he doesn’t want them to hear about it lest they catch it.”

— Nicola Yoon

246. “It was beautiful. But it was sad too. Both things, and at the same time. I don’t know why so much of life is like that.”

— Nicola Yoon

247. “If people who were actually born here had to prove they were worthy enough to live in America, this would be a much less populated country.”

— Nicola Yoon

248. “We can have immortality or the memory of touch. But we can’t have both.”

— Nicola Yoon

249. “Dark matter is love. It’s the attracting force.”

— Nicola Yoon

250. “I’m glad you think this is funny,” he says. “Come on,” I say. “Tragedy is funny.” “Are we in a tragedy?” he asks, smiling broadly now. “Of course. Isn’t that what life is? We all die at the end.”

— Nicola Yoon