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

202. “I love this part of getting to know someone. How every new piece of information, every new expression, seems magical.”

— Nicola Yoon

203. “And she’s not wrong.”

— Nicola Yoon

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

207. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

209. “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

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. “Having dreams never killed anybody.”

— Nicola Yoon

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

216. “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

217. “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. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

220. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

223. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

234. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

236. “You can miss the future with people who are still alive too.”

— Nicola Yoon

237. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

239. “Love Triangle... They exist so the main character can choose between different versions of themselves: who they used to be and who they’re still becoming.”

— Nicola Yoon

240. “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

241. “Happiness is tricky. Sometimes you have to fight for it. Sometimes, though – the best times – it sneaks up behind you, wraps an arm around your waist and pulls you close.”

— Nicola Yoon

242. “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

243. “However, if the long shot is your only shot, then you have to take it.”

— 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. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “He tastes like salted caramel and sunshine. Or what I think salted caramel and sunshine taste like. He tastes like nothing I’ve ever experienced, like hope and possibility and future.”

— Nicola Yoon

250. “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