Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A novel

They didn’t have names, and so they weren’t characters to her, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist.

The key to being a good thief, Sam always felt, was utter brazenness.

“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.”

Sam’s grandfather had two core beliefs: (1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken.

“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.”

The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.

Sadie, like Sam, had a gift for imagining herself in the future.

“The child’s body moves the way a body can move before it has felt or even encountered the idea of pain.” Oh, the ambitions of design documents!

the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.