A collection of my favorite quotes from Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Garbrielle Zevin.
“I want your advice about something,” Sadie said.
“Of course.”
“How do you get over a failure?”
“I think you mean a public failure. Because we all fail in private. I failed with you, for example, but no one posted an online review about it, unless you did. I fail with my wife and my son. I fail in my work every day, but I keep turning over the problems until I’m not failing anymore. But public failures are different, it’s true.”
— p. 219
“It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”
“Are you saying I get to quit making games?”
“No,” Marx said. “You’re stuck. You’re doing this forever.”
— p. 228
She walked through another gate.
It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t.)
— p. 228
A long pause, before Sam responded, “I like this idea a lot, but Sadie, you’re cool with this?”
“I am,” she said. “Myre Landing will still exist to those who bought the original game, but I think this is an opportunity to bring Mapletown to a larger audience. If it doesn’t work, all we’ve lost is a lot of time and money.”
Sam laughed. “Let’s do this,” he said.
— p. 231
“Torschlusspanik,” Simon said.
“Okay,” Sam said. “I’ll bite.”
“Don’t encourage him,” Ant said.
“What’s Torschlusspanik?” Sam said.
“It means ‘gate-shut panic,’” Simon said. “It’s the fear that time is running out and that you’re going to miss an opportunity. Literally, the gate is closing, and you’ll never get in.”
“That’s me,” Sam said. “I have that constantly.”
— p. 270
You are in a strawberry field.
You are dead.
A prompt comes up on the screen: start game from the beginning?
Yes, you think. Why not? If you play again, you might win.
Suddenly, there you are, brand new, feathers restored, bones unbroken, sanguine with fresh blood.
— p. 304
Charlotte turned her laptop towards Sam.
Onstage, in the middle of white Elizabethan England, improbably stands an Asian man as Macbeth. Macbeth has just heard the news that his wife had died, and he is given the most famous soliloquy from the play, the “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” speech.
— p. 335
“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
— p. 336
“Mazer and I were best friends growing up, and we loved playing games together. We were obsessed with the idea of the perfect play. The idea is that there was a way to play any game that had the minimal number of errors, the least moral compromises, the quickest pace, the highest number of points. The idea that you could do a game without ever dying or restarting.”
— p. 376
There were three things that had driven her, and none of them reflected a particular generosity of spirit on Sadie’s part: (1) wanting to distinguish herself enough professionally so that everyone at MIT would know that Sadie Green had not been admitted to the college on a girl curve, (2) wanting Dov to know that he shouldn’t have dumped her, and (3) wanting Sam to know that he was lucky to be working with her, that she was the great programmer in their team, that she was the one with the big ideas. But how to explain this to Destiny? How to explain to Destiny that the thing that made her work leap forward in 1996 was that she had been a dervish of selfishness, resentment, and insecurity.
Sadie had willed herself to be great: art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.
— p. 378