words I liked: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

This book had so much beautiful writing to capture. The story itself is touching. There so many themes of love, friendship, life and achievement.

A really interesting way to capture the way and the reasons that we might segment the loves in our lives:

Alice was clever, but she had the kind of cleverness that verged on the unkind … Sadie didn’t want Sam viewed through her sister’s acute and often forgiving lens.

I just love this turn of phrase - she effortlessly made a storm with her eyes:

…she slammed the door, and then once she was alone, she effortlessly made a storm with her eyes.

Loving doesn’t have to mean fixing the problem, always a useful reminder:

Freda simply nodded and took Sadie in her arms. “Oh, my love, this must be a very great loss.” She … canceled her afternoon, and she took Sadie to lunch at her favourite restaurant”

Attention is a form of love:

No one took him, and his queries, more seriously than she did.

Sometimes all you need to do, is choose to stay:

He was about to leave, but then he didn’t.

… and a reminder of how easy it can be, to be meaningful:

…he made the world a little easier for Sam, and it cost him next to nothing to do so.

There are all kinds of friendship:

They had the rare kind of friendship that allowed for a great deal of privacy within it.

Don’t forget to check for whether careful handling is required:

“There are people like you and like me. We have bad things happen to us, and we survive them. We are sturdy. But with people like your friend, you must be exceptionally gentle, or they may break.”

…and sometimes flexibility is strength:

Somehow, Sam was able to bend to her criticism in a way that he had never been able to before.

When we are young, we are brave by default. We don’t know any different:

The child’s body moves the way a body can move before it has felt or even encountered the idea of pain.

…but maybe we can choose that same bravery, even once we have learned a little:

These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.

After all, why stop playing?

“You can watch if you want. I’m going to play until the end of this life.”

“That’s a good philosophy.”

I can’t quite put the words to what these ones capture, but they belong together:

He wanted Ichigo’s life, a lifetime of endless, immaculate tomorrows, free of mistakes and the evidence of having lived.

“How do you get over a failure?”

“I think you mean a public failure. Because we all fail in private.”

While Sadie experience this period of indecision as stressful, Sam didn’t feel that way at all. The best part of this moment, he thought, is that everything is still possible.

We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living.

This one does need a bit of an understanding of the story itself to appreciate. The beauty is that in the same sentence it captures the harrowing absence, yet enduring presence, of a love:

Sadie’s instinct had been to tell Sam, but they weren’t speaking at the time.

A reminder to embrace the doing and the creating:

There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

If you have read the story, it’s hard not to love Marx, and Marx knows love:

To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could.

…and:

“I rather like to be consumed.”

…capturing a certain kind of love:

Marx was a prodigious reader, and he felt like Sadie might be the kind of book that one could read many times, and always come away with something new.

There is beauty to be found in the world:

It was only when he was alone and he couldn’t participate in the business of living that he tended to notice how lovely being alive was.

When you look for it, it’s everywhere:

Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know - were persimmons his favourite fruit, or had they just now become his favourite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard?

To embrace the beauty in life, fill your infinite days with something!

“I suppose we drink and we smoke for the same reasons it is done elsewhere. We must fill our infinite days with something.”