Top 500 Nicola Yoon Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I love the way she seems to feel things with her entire body. I wonder why a girl who is so obviously passionate is so adamantly against passion.”

— Nicola Yoon

202. “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

203. “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

204. “I think that’s nonsense. We’re not snowflakes. We’re just outputs for a set of inputs.” I stop nodding. “Like a formula?” “Exactly like a formula.” He props himself up to his elbows and looks at me. “I think there are one or two inputs that matter the most. Figure those out and you’ve figured out the person. You can predict anything about them.”

— Nicola Yoon

205. “This day can’t be all there is,” Daniel says once, and then twice. Natasha doesn’t say what she suspects. That meant to be doesn’t have to mean forever.”

— Nicola Yoon

206. “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

207. “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

208. “What if we are just a digression in someone else’s history?”

— Nicola Yoon

209. “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

210. “Touching him is order and chaos, like being assembled and disassembled at the same time.”

— Nicola Yoon

211. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

213. “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.”

— Nicola Yoon

214. “It’s hard trying to hold on to a place that doesn’t want you.”

— Nicola Yoon

215. “I’ve read many, many books involving heartache. Not one has ever described it as little. Soul-shattering and world-destroying yes. Little, no” -Madeline.”

— Nicola Yoon

216. “Her world is bigger than him and the things he taught her to be interested in. He doesn’t know when she outgrew him.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

219. “Infinite. The state of not knowing where one body ends and another begins.”

— Nicola Yoon

220. “She gave her son an American name followed by a Korean personal name followed by the family name. She named him Charles Jae Won Bae. She named her second son Daniel Jae Ho Bae. 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. “How 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

222. “You’re afraid of becoming your dad. You don’t want to choose the wrong thing, so you don’t choose anything at all.”

— Nicola Yoon

223. “But you believe in something?” She frowns, uncertain. “I really don’t know. I guess I’m more interested in why people feel like they have to believe in God. Why can’t it just be science? Science is wondrous. The night sky? Amazing. The inside of a human cell? Incredible. Something that tells us we’re born bad and that people use to justify all their petty prejudices and awfulness? I dunno. I guess I believe in science. Science is enough.”

— Nicola Yoon

224. “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

225. “Q: Will I encounter turbulence? A: Yes. Into all lives a little turbulence must fall.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

227. “To her I’m just another anonymous face, another applicant, another someone who wants something from America.”

— Nicola Yoon

228. “Be careful because once you become a part of the world it becomes a part of you, too.”

— Nicola Yoon

229. “Apparently-according to these posters, at least-only certain hairstyles are allowed to attend board meetings.”

— Nicola Yoon

230. “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

231. “We are born to dream and make the things we dream about.”

— Nicola Yoon

232. “Natasha knows that if she has to leave America, all her friendships, even with Bev, will fade. Sure, they’ll try to stay in touch at the beginning, but it won’t be the same as seeing each other every day.”

— Nicola Yoon

233. “Time stumbles back into place. The plane and the seats reform. The passengers solidify into flesh. And blood. And bone. And heart.”

— Nicola Yoon

234. “All of which isn’t to say that Jeremy Fitzgerald did the right thing or the wrong thing. It’s only to say this: love always changes everything.”

— Nicola Yoon

235. “His words made me aware that the heart in my chest is a muscle like any other. It can hurt.”

— Nicola Yoon

236. “Sometime the world reveals itself to you.”

— Nicola Yoon

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”

— Nicola Yoon

241. “And I get it. I really do. Some days it’s hard to BE in America. Some days I feel like I’m halfway to the moon, trapped between the Earth and it.”

— Nicola Yoon

242. “Sometimes you fall off prematurely. Sometimes you get so damaged by other pieces of luggage falling on your head that you don’t really function anymore. Sometimes you get lost or forgotten and go around forever and ever.”

— Nicola Yoon

243. “Some people aren’t happy until everything is done their way.”

— Nicola Yoon

244. “For most immigrants, moving to the new country is an act of faith. Even if you’ve heard stories of safety, opportunity, and prosperity, it’s still a leap to remove yourself from your own language, people, and country. Your own history. What if the stories weren’t true? What if you couldn’t adapt? What if you weren’t wanted in the new country?”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

246. “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

247. “Desperation translates into every language.”

— Nicola Yoon

248. “It’s a long life to spend doing something you’re only meh about.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

250. “I hear the wind disturbing the trees. I hear birds gossiping in the mornings. I see the rectangles of sunlight that slip through my blinds and work their way across the room throughout the day.”

— Nicola Yoon