Top 500 Nicola Yoon Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 7 of 10

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

— Nicola Yoon

302. “I decide then that love is a terrible, terrible thing. Loving someone as fiercely as my mom loves me must be like wearing your heart outside of your body with no skin, no bones, no nothing to protect it.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

304. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

306. “I know she’s just trying to protect me, just as I was to protect myself a few short weeks ago, but her words make me aware that the heart in my chest is a muscles like any other. It can hurt.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

308. “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

309. “She hates not knowing what happens next. Uncertainty is her enemy.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

311. “What do I regret? That I went outside in the first place. That I saw and fell in love with the world. That I fell in love with Olly.”

— Nicola Yoon

312. “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

313. “Spoiler alert: Everything is nothing.”

— Nicola Yoon

314. “He bumps me lightly with his shoulder and then steadies me with his hand on my back. I like the feel of his hand so much that I speed up a little to avoid it.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

316. “Isn’t growing apart a part of growing up?”

— Nicola Yoon

317. “He smiles and doesn’t try to keep any of the sadness off his face. How can he be so okay with showing off his heart?”

— Nicola Yoon

318. “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

319. “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

320. “Who knew you were this stubborn?” Not me. I didn’t know I was this stubborn.”

— Nicola Yoon

321. “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

322. “Should I tell him that I think dreams never die even when they’re dead?”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “Desperation translates into every language.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

331. “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

332. “It’s not that Daniel wants to let Natasha go. He holds on for as long as he can. But he hearts the strain in her voice across the distance. In her new accent, he hears the cadence of her slipping away from him.”

— Nicola Yoon

333. “My butterflies are rioting.”

— Nicola Yoon

334. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

348. “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

349. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon