Top 500 Nicola Yoon Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “And she’s not wrong.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

205. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

207. “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?”

— Nicola Yoon

208. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

222. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

225. “Maybe we can’t predict everything, but we can predict some things. For example, I am certainly going to fall in love with Olly. It’s almost certainly going to be a disaster.”

— Nicola Yoon

226. “Everything’s different and the same. I’m still Maddy. Olly’s still Olly. But we’re both more somehow. I know him in a new way. And I feel known, too.”

— Nicola Yoon

227. “I once told Olly that I knew my our heart better than I knew anything else, and it’s still true. I know the places in my heart, but the names have all changed.”

— Nicola Yoon

228. “Maybe it does bother me,′ he says, ’but only peripherally. It’s like a buzzing fly, you know? Annoying, but not actually life-threatening.”

— Nicola Yoon

229. “He tells me that high school is no utopia, but I’m not convinced. What else would you call a place that exists solely to teach you about the world? What do you call a place with friends and teachers and libraries and book club and math club and debate club and any other kind of club and after-school activities and endless possibilities?”

— Nicola Yoon

230. “Studies have shown that the pupils of people who are attracted to each other dilate from the presence of dopamine. Other studies suggest that threads in the eye can indicate personality tendencies, and that maybe eyes are a kind of window to the soul after all.”

— Nicola Yoon

231. “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

232. “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

233. “I love how simple this is for her. I love that her solution to everything is to tell the truth. I struggle with my identity and she tells me just to say what’s true.”

— Nicola Yoon

234. “We are lips and arms and legs and bodies entangled. He raises himself above me and we are wordless, and then we are joined and moving silently. We are joined and I know all of the secrets of the universe.”

— Nicola Yoon

235. “You’re not living life if you’re not regretting.”

— Nicola Yoon

236. “Maybe growing up is disappointing the people, who we love.”

— Nicola Yoon

237. “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

238. “I think all the good parts of us are connected on some level. The part that shares the last double chocolate chip cookie or donates to charity or gives a dollar to a street musician or becomes a candy striper or cries at Apple commercials or says I love you or I forgive you. I think that’s God. God is the connection of the very best parts of us.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

240. “He remembered sitting at the breakfast bar and stirring the milk and chocolate together. How the chocolate turned white, and the milk turned brown, and how sometimes you can’t unmix things no matter how much you might want to.”

— Nicola Yoon

241. “I’m happy to have choices. They’re mine to make.”

— Nicola Yoon

242. “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

243. “Nothing hurts except my heart, but I’m trying not to use it. I read my books. Existential or nihilist ones. I have no patience for books that pretend life has meaning. I have no patience for happy endings.”

— Nicola Yoon

244. “In capul meu, stiu c-am mai fost indragostit, dar nu simt asa. Sa fiu indragostit de tine e mai bine decat prima oara. Se simte ca prima si ca ultima oara si ca singura oara, toate odata.”

— Nicola Yoon

245. “I turn in his arms, thinking how quickly it’s become my favourite place in the world. Familiar, foreign, comforting, and thrilling all at once.”

— Nicola Yoon

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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