Top 500 Nicola Yoon Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “It’s a long life to spend doing something you’re only meh about.”

— Nicola Yoon

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

206. “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

207. “I’m all the way here in Hawaii with you,” I say, repeating his words. “I never would’ve left my house if it weren’t for you.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

209. “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

210. “Our history is too compressed. We’re trying to fit a lifetime into a day.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

212. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

214. “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

215. “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

216. “It smells good. You know sometimes in spring when it rains just for like five minutes and then the sun comes out right away and the water’s evaporating and the air is still damp? It smells like that. Really good.”

— Nicola Yoon

217. “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

218. “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

219. “Everyone loves to hate love triangles, but actually they’re great. They exist so the main character can choose between different versions of themselves: who they used to be, and who they’re still becoming. Side note: If you ever find yourself choosing between a vampire and a werewolf, choose the vampire.”

— Nicola Yoon

220. “If my life were a book and you read it backward, nothing would change. Today is the same as yesterday. Tomorrow will be the same as today. In.”

— Nicola Yoon

221. “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

222. “You can’t persuade someone to love you.”

— Nicola Yoon

223. “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

224. “And she’s not wrong.”

— Nicola Yoon

225. “That night she listened to the Nirvana album again. In Kurt Cobain’s voice, Irene heard a perfect and beautiful misery, a voice stretched so thin with loneliness and wanting that it should break. But his voice didn’t break, and there was a kind of joy in it too.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

227. “She comes close again and I barrel ahead, because apparently that’s who I am with this girl. Maybe part of falling in love with someone else is also falling in love with yourself. I like who I am with her. I like that I say what’s on my mind. I like that I barrel ahead despite the obstacles she raises. Normally I would give up, but not today.”

— Nicola Yoon

228. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

230. “Stories help shape the way we see ourselves in the world. They help tell us who we can be and what we can achieve.”

— Nicola Yoon

231. “I’m giddy and trying not to be. This is more difficult than you’d imagine. Trying not to smile only makes you smile more.”

— Nicola Yoon

232. “Having dreams never killed anybody.”

— Nicola Yoon

233. “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

234. “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

235. “My butterflies are rioting.”

— Nicola Yoon

236. “I tell you, when I left my house that night I never felt more free. Even now, in all the time that I’ve been here, I never felt as free as that night.”

— Nicola Yoon

237. “According to scientists, there are three stages of love: lust, attraction, and attachment. And, it turns out, each of the stages is orchestrated by chemicals – neurotransmitters – in the brain.”

— Nicola Yoon

238. “Maybe we don’t need acts two and three. Maybe love is best in act one.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

240. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

243. “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

244. “But it’s never just one moment. It’s a series of them. And your life can branch out from each one in a thousand different ways. Maybe there’s a version of your life for all the choices you make and all the choices you don’t.”

— Nicola Yoon

245. “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

246. “Boys come and go, but mothers are forever.”

— Nicola Yoon

247. “Because everything looks like chaos up close. Daniel thinks it’s a matter of scale. If you pull back far enough and wait for long enough, then order emerges.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon