Top 500 Nicola Yoon Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Sometimes I reread my favorite books from back to front. I start with the last chapter and read backward until I get to the beginning. When you read this way, characters go from hope to despair, from self-knowledge to doubt. In love stories, couples start out as lovers and end as strangers. Coming-of-age books become stories of losing your way. Your favorite characters come back to life.”

— Nicola Yoon

353. “Los amores sin futuro forman parte de la vida.- Carla.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

355. “In modern times, the sisters have largely disappeared from the collective consciousness, but the idea of Fate hasn’t. Why do we still believe? Does it make tragedy more bearable to believe that we ourselves had no hand in it, that we couldn’t have prevented it? It was always ever thus.”

— Nicola Yoon

356. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

358. “Maybe their universe is just taking longer to form.”

— Nicola Yoon

359. “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

360. “Sometimes words are just not enough.”

— Nicola Yoon

361. “In darkness, there’s still hope. Some hidden things in the places you can’t see. Grief to me feels like an endless landscape of white light. No secrets. No surprises either. You can see clearly all you have lost. Everything that is no longer there.”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

363. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

369. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

371. “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

372. “It’s at least thirty seconds before everyone puts back on his or her protective I’m-on-a-train-filled-with-strangers face. I wonder if that was the dancers’ intention – to get us all to connect just for a moment.”

— Nicola Yoon

373. “As our eyes meet, I get a kind of deja vu, but instead of feeling like I’m repeating something in the past, it feels like I’m experiencing something that will happen in my future... It’s like knowing all the words to a song but still finding them beautiful and surprising.”

— Nicola Yoon

374. “You’re kind of a hopeless romantic,” I say.”

— Nicola Yoon

375. “Desperation translates into every language.”

— Nicola Yoon

376. “Life is a gift. Am I wasting mine?”

— Nicola Yoon

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

380. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

383. “Angst is good for you. It’s the asking of questions that’s important, not the answers.”

— Nicola Yoon

384. “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

385. “Sometimes I wish there were a weather report for your life. Tomorrow’s forecast is for routine high school shenanigans in the morning, but with dramatic parental betrayal by late afternoon, ending with wild emotional despair by nightfall. Details after the next commercial break.”

— Nicola Yoon

386. “What is it about being in the same room with him that makes me so conscious of my body and all its parts? He even makes me aware of my skin.”

— Nicola Yoon

387. “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

388. “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

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

— Nicola Yoon

390. “Well, I think there’s something wrong with everyone, don’t you?”

— Nicola Yoon

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

— Nicola Yoon

392. “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

393. “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

394. “I stifle the urge to go back to the window and assess my competition. But it’s not a competition if one person can’t even show up for the event.”

— Nicola Yoon

395. “Be Brave. Remember, life is a gift.”

— Nicola Yoon

396. “It’s hard to come for someplace or someone you’re not proud of.”

— Nicola Yoon

397. “Everyone wants to be able to predict the future.”

— Nicola Yoon

398. “But he’s a married man. His heart is not the only one involved.”

— Nicola Yoon

399. “He will hold her and wonder, very briefly, about the future that loving her will cost him.”

— Nicola Yoon

400. “She does it simply because it looks beautiful.”

— Nicola Yoon