Top 500 Nicola Yoon Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “People feel so much. Love is so big and it leaves behind a crater. Even when it’s wrong.”

— Nicola Yoon

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “Desperation translates into every language.”

— Nicola Yoon

274. “It’s soothing to see an entire world at once-to see the pieces and know how it all fits together.”

— Nicola Yoon

275. “I want to fall in love, with an emphasis on the falling part.”

— Nicola Yoon

276. “It amazes me that people spend their entire days inside places like this doing things they don’t love for people they don’t like.”

— Nicola Yoon

277. “I’m not usually a stalker, and I’m not following her, exactly. I’m maintaining a noncreepy, half-block distance between us.”

— Nicola Yoon

278. “Our bodies are having their own conversation separate and apart from us.”

— Nicola Yoon

279. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

284. “I couldn’t imagine taking him to meet my dad. Watching them talk to each other would’ve been tortuous. Also, I never wanted him to see how small our apartment was. In the end, I guess I really didn’t want him to know me.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

286. “Because of you I’ve survived this long and gotten a chance to know my small part of the world. But it’s not enough. It’s not your fault. It’s this impossible life. I’m not doing this just because of Olly. Or maybe I am. I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s Olly and it’s not-Olly at the same time. It’s like I can’t look at the world in the old way anymore. I found this new part of myself when I met him and the new part doesn’t know how to stay quiet and still and just observe.”

— Nicola Yoon

287. “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

288. “The wanting scares me. It’s like a weed that spreads slowly, just beneath your notice. Before you know it, it’s pitted your surfaces and darkened your windows.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

290. “I wonder why a girl who is so obviously passionate is so adamantly against passion.”

— Nicola Yoon

291. “But not because he’s evil. And not because he’s a Stereotypical Korean Parent. But because he can’t see past his own history to let us have ours.”

— Nicola Yoon

292. “I love how simple this is for her. I love that her solution for everything is to tell the truth. I struggle with my identity and she tells me just to say what’s true. “It’s not up to you to help other people fit you into a box,” she says.”

— Nicola Yoon

293. “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

294. “My mother loved my father. He was the love of her life. And she loved my brother. He was the love of her life. And she loves me. I am the love of her life.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

296. “From so high above it, the world seems ordered and deliberate.”

— Nicola Yoon

297. “Meeting your obligations is the definition of adulthood, kid. If you’re going to make mistakes and break promises, now’s the time.”

— Nicola Yoon

298. “Trascorsa un’epoca, finalmente la settimana si conclude.”

— Nicola Yoon

299. “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

300. “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