Top 500 Nicola Yoon Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

254. “Almost everything in the night sky gives off light. Even if we can’t see it, the light is still there.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

256. “Imagine, though, if you could just change the right inputs; you could fix things before they went wrong.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

267. “Love is worth the ultimate sacrifice.”

— Nicola Yoon

268. “People who say it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all have never really loved anyone and never really lost anyone either.”

— Nicola Yoon

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

274. “It’s not decent to be good at everything. Three or four things at the most. Even that is pushing the bounds of good taste.”

— Nicola Yoon

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

278. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

285. “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

286. “I have no patience for books that pretend life has meaning. I have no patience for happy endings.”

— Nicola Yoon

287. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

289. “I love this part of getting to know someone. How every new piece of information, every new expression, seems magical. I can’t imagine this becoming old and boring. I can’t imagine not wanting to hear what she has to say.”

— Nicola Yoon

290. “Love is too small, too singular a word for the feeling it’s trying to hold. Just one word isn’t enough, so I want to use them all. Sometimes I think love is the reason language was invented.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

292. “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

293. “Desperation translates into every language.”

— Nicola Yoon

294. “You did all the things you were supposed to, and you’re still not happy.”

— Nicola Yoon

295. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

297. “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

298. “America is the land of opportunity. His children will have more than he once did.”

— Nicola Yoon

299. “The world is too big and there’s not enough time for me to see it.”

— Nicola Yoon

300. “He holds his hands up like he’s defending himself, like he’s trying to push the words in the air back into me.”

— Nicola Yoon