Zevin, Gabrielle

Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow

Preface –

That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.

-Emily Dickinson

p.7 – " ‘Come on, Sadie. There’ll always be another class. How many times can you look at something and know that everyone around you is seeing the same thing or at the very least that their brains and eyes are responding to the same phenomenon? How much proof do you ever have that we’re all in the same world?’ "
p.8 – “Beneath Sadie’s eyes were barely perceptible crescents, but then, she’d had these as a kid too. Still, he felt she seemed tired. Sam looked at Sadie, and he thought, This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.”
p.10 – “And yet, he knew himself and he knew he was the type of person that never called anyone, unless he was absolutely certain the advance would be welcomed. His brain was treacherously negative. He would invent that she had been cold toward him, that she hadn’t even had a class that day, that she had simply wanted to get away from Sam. His brain would insist that if she’d wanted to see him, she would have given him a way to contact her.”
p.11 – " ‘You’re incredibly gifted, Sam. But it is worth noting that to be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.’ "
p.14 – “She imagined that ‘caution’ was a creature of some kind– maybe, a cross between a Saint Bernard and an elephant. A large, intelligent, friendly animal that could be counted on to defend the Green sisters from threats, existential and otherwise.”
p.21 – “Because lately, Sadie was almost always in trouble. It was impossible to be eleven, with a sick sister, and for people to find your conduct beyond reproach. She was always saying the wrong thing, or being too loud, or demanding too much (time, love, food), even though she had not demanded more than what had been freely given before.”
p.21 – “To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back – I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love.”
p.23 – " ‘Friendship is friendship, and charity is charity,’ Freda said. ‘You know very well that I was in Germany as a child, and you have heard the stories, so I won’t tell them to you again. But I can tell you that the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.’ "
p.24 – “It wasn’t a deception, per se. She wasn’t hiding the fact of her community service from Sam, but the longer it went on, the less she felt that she could ever tell him. She knew that the presence of the timesheet made it seem as if she had an ulterior motive, though the truth was obvious to her: Sadie Green liked being praised, and Sam Masur was the best friend she had ever had.”
p.29 – " ‘This is bullshit, Dov,’ Florian said. He was very pale, and his skin flushed a psychedelic pink."
p.29 – " ‘Dude, dude.’ Dov smacked Florian affectionately on the shoulder, and then he pulled him into an aggressive bear hug. ‘Next time, we fail better.’ "
p.31 – " ‘Everyone wins,’ Dov said. ‘That’s the genius of it, right?’ "
p.31 – " ‘Everyone loses,’ Sadie said. ‘The game’s about being complicit.’ Genius. Dov had said genius.
p.33 – “She had inadvertently ended up having an affair with a married man and even though she hadn’t known that at the beginning, she knew it now. And maybe, if she were honest with herself, she had known. Maybe she had been like the player in Solution. Maybe she hadn’t asked the right or enough questions because she hadn’t wanted to know the answers.”
p.33 – “There were even fewer women in professional games than there were at MIT, and Sadie didn’t want to hobble herself before she’d begun her career. It was unfair, but attractive young women who had reputations for sleeping with powerful men acquired professional baggage.”
p.34 – “Sadie hadn’t worked on a game of her own since she’d been with Dov, though she did occasionally help him with his. It was easier, in some ways, to work with and for Dov than it was to do her own work. Her work seemed basic and uninteresting compared to the kind of work Dov was doing. Her work was basic and uninteresting. She had just turned twenty. Everyone’s work is basic and uninteresting at twenty. But being around Dov made her feel impatient with her twenty-year-old brain and the quality of its ideas.”
pp.34-35 – “Before returning to Israel for the winter break, Dov had warned Sadie that he wouldn’t be in contact much. ‘Family things,’ he said. ‘You know how it is.’ Sadie said she was cool, though even as she said it, she wasn’t sure if she was cool. She knew she had no choice but to be cool. And cool girls definitely didn’t ask their lovers if they were planning to see their supposedly estranged wives over winter break. If she wasn’t cool, Dov might end the relationship, and Sadie couldn’t bear that. She had come to depend on Dov.”
p.35 – “If she told him about a game she admiredthat he didn’t think much of, he would tell her the reasons the game was terrible. And that didn’t just go for games– it was movies, books, and art, too. It got to the point where she would never outright say her opinion of anything. She trained hersel to begin conversations, ‘What do you think, Dov?’ "
p.38 – “Sadie paused for a second. Though she had known this day would come, she had not prepared what she would say.”
p.39 – " ‘I don’t believe you,’ Sam said. ‘You were never my friend. You’re some rich asshole volunteer from Beverly Hills, and I’m a mentally ill poor kid, with a screwed up leg. Well, I don’t require your patronage anymore.’ "
p.41 – " ‘I messed up,’ Sadie said miserably. ‘I’m a terrible person.’ She worried that Freda would yell at her, say I told you so, insist that Sadie go in and try to apologize to Sam, which Sadie knew would be pointless. Adults always though they could fix children’s problems.”
p.41 – " ‘It is no easy matter being the little sister, this I know. And I am also proud of you for befriending that boy. Even if things ended badly, it was a good thing you did for him and for yourself. That boy was utterly friendless, injured, alone. You were not a perfect friend, but you were friend, and he needed a friend.’ "
p.41 – " ‘Always remember, mine Sadie: life is very long, unless it is not.’ "
pp.42-43 – “Sadie would not cry. ‘When I didn’t hear from you, I thought it was something like that,’ she said in an easy, practiced voice. Be cool, she thought. Her brain furiously ran through all the reasons to be cool. She might want a recommendation letter from him some day, if she decided to go to grad school. She might want to work at a company that he worked for. She might want to design a game with him. She might end up on a panel with him, or he might be the judge for a gaming award. Sadie, like Sam, had a gift for imagining herself in the future. She saw a future in which she would not be Dov’s lover, but she still might be his colleague, his employee, his friend. If she was cook, this time won’t have been a waste. Life is very long, she thought, unless it is not.”
p.43 – " ‘He’s being smart actually, if he thinks he has a hit on his hands,’ Dov said. ‘It’s not only being a good programmer or a good designer, Sadie. You have to be a marketeer and a showman. You’ll learn that eventually.’ "
p.44 – " ‘You aren’t just a gamer when you play anymore. You’re a builder of worlds, and if you’re a builder of worlds, your feelings are not as imporant as what you gamers are feeling. You must imagine them at all times. There is no artist more empathetic than the game designer.’ Sadie the gamer found this scene sexist and strange. At the same time, Sadie the world builder accepted that the game was made by one of the most creative minds in gaming. And in those days, girls like Sadie were conditioned to ignore the sexist generally, not just in gaming– it wasn’t cool to point such things out. If you wanted to play with the boys, they couldn’t be afraid of saying things around you. If someone said the sound effect in your game sounded like a queef, it was your job to laugh. But on this evening, Sadie wasn’t in the mood to laugh."
p.45 – “The character you play in Metal Gear Solid is called Solid Snake, whose main antagonist is Liquid Snake, who is constructed of the same genetic material as you. The profundity of this struck Sadie in this moment– yes, what greater enemy does one have than oneself? And wasn’t she to blame for all of this more than Dov? He had said it would be trouble if she came to his apartment, and still she had gone. If someone tells you there will be trouble, believe them.”
p.48 – “But wouldn’t it be even better if you could open another part of the game if you chose the moral path. After a while, if you used your points for any information, the mystery was obvious and the game became repetitive. Wouldn’t it be better if those who played well enough and morally enough could figure out how to reroute the factory’s output? The simulation, Sam felt, was incomplete, and thus, not fully satisfying. The simulation was incomplete because it didn’t have a call to action. The only feeling a player could have at the end of Sadie’s game was nihilism. Sam fully got what she was trying to do, but he also believed that she would have to do more if she were to make games that people loved, not just games that people admired.”
p.53 – " ‘Her parents can buy her anything she wants. Why would she want some dumb thing I drew on the back of an envelope?’ Sam said."
p.53 – " ‘I suppose,’ Dong Hyun said, ‘because her parents can buy her anything she wants.’ "
p.55 – “And so it went. Marx helped Sam with everything while never appearing to be helping Sam at all. And so, coats miraculously materialized in plastic bags, just waiting for Sam to ask about them. And gift certificates for restaurants were always left before the holidays when Sam couldn’t travel home. And when it became clear that Sam struggled to take the stairs in the dormitory they’d been assigned to, and that the elevator was only intermittently functional, Marx announced his intention to live off campus.”
p.55 – “Why did Marx do this for this strange boy, who most people found vaguely unpleasant? He liked Sam. He had spent his childhood among rich and supposedly interesting people, and he knew that truly unusual minds were rare. He felt that when Harvard had assigned them to be roommates, Sam had become his responsibility. So, he protected Sam, and he made the world a little easier for Sam, and it cost him next to nothing to do so. Marx’s life had been filled with such abundance that he was one of those people who found it natural to care for those around him. In this case, what Marx received in return was the pleasure of Sam’s company.”
p.57 – “Several hours later, he had finished the reading, which had been about Chinese immigration to America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how Chinese immigrants had only been allowed to do certain kinds of work, like food or cleaning, and that’s why there were so many Chinese restaurants and Chinese laundries, i.e., systemic racism.”
p.57 – " ‘Why do you keep coming?’ she asked."
pp.57-58 – " ‘Because,’ he said. Click on this word, he thought, and you will find links to everything it means. Because you are my oldest friend. Because once, when I was at my lowest, you saved me. Because I might have died without you or ended up in a children’s psychiatric hospital. Because I owe you. Because, selfishly, I see a future where we make fantastic games together, if you can manage to get out of bed. ‘Because,’ he repeated."
p.59 – " ‘…Promise me you’ll always forgive me, and I promise I’ll always forgive you.’ 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."
p.64 – “Retrospectively, he realized that he had made a grave miscalculation when he had ended the friendship with Sadie. His mistake had been in thinking the world would be filled with Sadie Greens, people like her. It was not.”
p.64 – “One of Sam’s eventual strengths as an artist and as a businessman was that he knew the importance of drama, of setting the scene.”
p.65 – “He was already imagining Sam-and-Sadie lore, and he didn’t even have a definitive idea for a game yet. But this was classic Sam– he had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.”
pp.68-69 – “Her time with Dov and her years studying games in general had made her critical of everything. She could tell you exactly what was wrong with any game, but she didn’t necessarily know how to make a great game herself. 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. And it is possible that, without Sam (or someone like him) pushing her through this period, Sadie might not have become the game designer she became. She might not have become a designer at all.”
p.69 – “It is worth noting that greatness for Sam and Sadie meant different things. To oversimplify: For Sam, greatness meant popular. For Sadie, art.”
p.71 – " ‘Exactly. I could save the princess, even when I could barely get out of bed. So, I do want to be rich and famous. I am, as you know, a bottomless pit of ambition and need. But I also want to make something sweet. Something kids like us would have wanted to play to forget their troubles for a while.’ "
p.73 – “Until Harvard, he had not realized that in America– and not just in its college theaters– there were only so many roles an Asian could play.”
p.75 – “Other people’s parents are often a delight.”
p.78 – “And as any mixed-race person will tell you– to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing. And, by the way, I don’t own or have a particularly rich understanding of the references of Jewishness or Koreanness because I happen to be those things.”
pp.78-79 – “Beauty, after all, is almost always a matter of angles and resolve.”
p.80 – “What was amazing to Sam– and what became a theme of the games he would go on to make with Sadie– was how quickly the world could shift. How your sense of self could change depending on your location. As Sadie would put it in an interview with Wired, ‘The game character, like the self, is contextual.’ "
p.82 – “Anna was a great talker, and it was one of the most profound pleasures of young Sam’s life to discuss the world and its mysteries with his mother. No one took him, and his queries, more seriously than she did.”
p.87 – " ‘He can help us if he’s here.’ "
p.87 – " ‘With what?’ Sadie said. As far as Sadie knew, Marx was a good-looking rich kid with a wide range of interests and very few skills. At Crossroads, where she’d gone to high school, half of her male classmates had been Marxes.”
p.87 – " ‘With everything that we’re not doing. You’ll see,’ Sam said. ‘He’s a resource, if we choose to employ him that way.’ "
p.88 – “In the design document that she and Sam had written: ‘The child’s body moves the way a body can move before it has felt or even encourtered the idea of pain.’ Oh, the ambitions of design documents!”
p.90 – “Though it took Sadie years to admit this to Sam, Marx did prove incredibly useful that summer. No, Marx wasn’t a game designer. He wasn’t an ace programmer, like Sadie, and he couldn’t draw, like Sam. But he did almost everything else for them, and his contributions ranged from the pedestrian, but necessary, to the creatively essential. Marx organized workflow, so Sadie and Sam were more aware of what the other was doing and what they needed to be doing.”
p.91 – “In a way, Marx found producing for Sadie and Sam to be not entirely different from just being Sam’s roommate. Without calling a great deal of attention to himself, he made things easy for them. He fought fires. He anticipated needs and obstacles before they arose. That is what a producer does, and Marx would turn out to be a very fine producer.”
p.97 – “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. Sam believed these things as well.”
p.98 – “Sadie took some of Sam’s concept art out of her messenger bag and she showed it to him. ‘Whoa, trippy,’ Dov said. Then she took out her laptop so that he could play the first level. ‘This is fucking fantastic work,’ Dov said. He never gave compliments that he didn’t mean, and Sadie almost felt like crying. It was frankly embarrassing how much his approval still meant to her. ‘I like this.’ Dov looked at Sadie. He set the concept art on the desk. He looked in her eyes, and then he nodded. ‘You’re here for Ulysses, aren’t you?’ "
p.104 – “Sadie kissed Marx on both his cheeks, in a campy European way. He was such a fan. Every collaboration needs one.”
p.105 – “They were tired, but it was an honest tiredness, the kind that comes when you know you have put everything you have into a project.”
p.108 – “He had never seen anything die before and so, he could not be certain that she was dying. And yet, somewhere deep inside himself, he felt a recognition and then a reckoning: this was death, and he would die, and his mother would die, and everyone you ever met and ever loved would die, and maybe it would happen when you or they were old, but maybe not. To know this was unbearable: it was a fact too large for a nine-year old avatar to contain.”
p.109 – " ‘I didn’t know how else to leave,’ the other Anna Lee said. She tried to shrug, but then her body began to spasm, and ninety long seconds later, she died. Anna stood up. She stood over the other Anna Lee’s body and began to feel giddily, vertiginously untethered from her own body.”
p.111 – “The obvious place for them to go was Los Angeles, the city of her birth. She had resisted returning there because to return to one’s hometown felt like surrender.”
p.115 – “Dov laughed. ‘I forget how young you are. You’re still at the age where you mistake your friends and your colleagues for family.’ "
pp.117-118 – “He had hoped he would be patched up and easily sent home, with an overpriced bottle of aspirin, and that neither of them would have had to be involved at all. He didn’t want them to see him as weak, even though that was how he felt. Weak, frail, alone, exhausted. He was tired of his body, of his unreliable foot, which couldn’t even handle the slightest expression of joy.”
pp.132-133 – “Someone had to do it, and Sadie felt uncomfortable speaking about the work– the work, she naively felt, should speak for itself. Sadie was twenty-two when Ichigo was launched, and she hadn’t figured out who she was in public yet. (She barely knew who she was in private.)”
p.137 – " ‘Sadie , that’s completely normal. The best teams are constantly at each other’s throats. It’s a part of the process. If you aren’t fighting, then someone doesn’t care enough about the work. Say you’re sorry. Move on.’ "
p.140 – “When she looked at him, she saw Sam, but she also saw Ichigo and Alice and Freda and Marx and Dov and all the mistakes she had made, and all her secret shames and fears, and all the best things she had done, too. Sometimes, she didn’t even like him, but the truth was, she didn’t know if an idea was worth pusuing until it had made its way through Sam’s brain, too.”
p.141 – “A glimmer of a notion of a nothing of a whisper of a figment of an idea.”
p.142 – “On the night Sam went missing, it occurred to Sadie that nothing in life was as solid-state as it appeared. A childish game might be deadly. A friend might disappear. And as much as a person might try to shield herself from it, the possibility for the other outcome was always there. 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.”
p.143 – “He and Sadie had stayed up all night, and he felt tired and content. He’d been away promoting the Ichigo games so much that he hadn’t had time to realize how much he had missed their collaboration.”
p.149 – " ‘Marx, my love, you are so innocent. You don’t have to convince anyone. You tell Sadie that Sam needs to go to California– his foot is rotting; he need to have the surgery and he won’t do it in Massachusetts. You tell Sam that Sadie needs to go– she needs to find a way to break with Dov. Those two are thick as thieves; they’ll do anything for each other.’ "
p.160 – " ‘No. You’ll never die. And if you ever died, I’d just start the game again,’ Sadie said.”
p.163 – “It was never any use to dig down on rejection feedback, though. Maybe they didn’t like her because she was no good, not talented, too short. Maybe they didn’t like her because they were racist or sexist or harboring some other secret prejudice. In the end, they didn’t like her because they didn’t like her. She wasn’t going to reason them out of their dislike. She wasn’t going to teach anyone anything.”
p.168 – " ‘Dad,’ Anna said, ‘it’s just a billboard. It’s not a big deal.’ Anna was embarrassed by the attention, embarrassed by the work she was doing. Simultaneously, she was proud that she had recently signed a lease on a town house in Studio City, which would put Sam in a superior public-school district. She was proud that her dad was proud."
p.172 – “There are, he determines, infinite ways his mother doesn’t die that night and only one way she does.”
p.181 – “In those days, they rarely spoke of anything but the game they were making, so she did not ask him for an explanation. She had stopped devoting any time to imagining her partner’s motivations.”
p.185 – “Mapletown General Hospital was based on every hospital he’d ever stayed in, and Alice’s illness and treatment, which comprised many of the Mapletown side quests and levels, was given the kind of corpuscular detail that could only have come from someone who had been chronically ill and understood the indignities of hospital life.”
p.192 – “Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.”
pp.195-196 – “After the surgery, he hadn’t wanted to be with other people. He had wanted to be alone with his pain. But then as the months passed and he began to feel somewhat better, he wondered where Sadie had gone. At first, he had assumed Sadie was respecting his need for privacy, but as time went on, he felt something off betweeen them. She had not visitied him in the hospital or come to see his new place. He wondered if she was repulsed by his amputation, though that didn’t seem like Sadie.”
p.198 – “With Both Sides, as opposed to Ichigo, she felt that she had been able to push the boundaries, technically and narratively. And what was the point of making games if you weren’t going to do that? She felt she’d reached a point where her ambitions and abilities were finally aligned. She was exhausted, as she always was after having made a game, but she had never felt more at peace with her own efforts.”
p.204 – “Sadie left the office and walked home to Clownerina, who now seemed to be mocking her with his foot that wouldn’t kick. She drew the curtains, and she got into bed, without taking off her clothes or her shoes. She felt ashamed and foolish. She felt covered in failure and she felt sure that people could smell and see it on her. The failure was like a fine coating of ash, after a fire. But it wasn’t only on her skin; it was in her nose, in her mouth, in her lungs, in her molecules becoming part of her. She would never be rid of it.”
p.217 – “Their presence, in combination with the failure of Both Sides, made her feel ancient and out of touch.”
p.217 – “There were so many people who could be your lover, but, if she was honest with herself, there were relatively few people who could move you creatively. Still, when she watched Simon and Ant, she felt that their personal relationship was riskier than her and Sam’s, though maybe it was more rewarding, too.”
p.219 – " ‘You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it’s a perfect time for you to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.’ "
p.227 – “Despite the title, the cherry blossoms are not the subject; it is a painting about the creative process– its solitude and the ways in which an artist, particularly a female one, is expected to disappear. The woman’s slate appears to be blank. ‘I know Hokusai is an inspiration for you,’ Watanabe-san said. ‘This is by Hokusai’s daughter. Only a handful of her paintings survive, but I think she is even better than the father.’ "
p.227 – " ‘No,’ Marx said. ‘I loved being a student actor. I was fully devoted to it, and now I’m not. I think if I’d become a professional, I would likely have fallen out of love with it anyway. It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.’ "
p.238 – “Exactly one month before the launch, terrorists had flown planes into skyscrapers and other buildings, and in the wake of that, Unfair had debated whether it was the right time to launch Mapleworld. Whether it felt in bad taste, and whether people would even want to play a game like Mapleworld at this moment in history. The world seemed so chaotic, people so tribal, and their game was so soft. In the end, they decided that there was never a good time to do anything. Mapleworld would launch as planned.”
p.247 – " ‘But there were too many Korean places in K-town, so we had to come up with something else. And that’s why we decided to make pizza. There weren’t any other pizza places in that part of K-town. It was scary, at first, because we didn’t know anything about pizza, but then we set ouselves to learning about pizza. We didn’t have any choice. We had two babies and bills to pay.’ "
p.252 – “Sam, Sadie, and Marx had debated whether it was the right time for a game as ‘soft’ as Mapleworld. As it turned out, in the late fall of 2001, Mapleworld was exactly what people craved. A virtual world that was better governed, kinder, and more understandable than their own.”
p.268 – " ‘Well, it wasn’t an option before,’ Simon said. ‘You can’t know you want something until it’s an option.’ "
p.270 – " ‘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.’ "
pp.271-272 – " ’ ‘Zweisamkeit’ is the feeling of being alone even when you’re with other people.’ Simon turned to look in his husband’s eyes. ‘Before I met you, I felt this constantly. I felt it with my family, my friends, and every boyfriend I ever had. I felt it so often that I thought this was the nature of living. To be alive was to accept that you were fundamentally alone.’ "
p.272 – " ‘I know I’m impossible, and I know you don’t care about German words or marriage. All I can say is, I love you and thank you for marrying me anyway.’ "
p.277 – “The work was the thing, she kept reminding herself. The work was the thing that lasted, but the work only lasted if people knew it existed.”
p.283 – “You are flying.”
p.283 – “Unobserved, a graying man watches two teenagers swim in a pond. You can smell the man’s longing, stronger than lavender, and you think, Humans want so much. I am glad to be a bird.”
p.284 – “You have had many lives. Before you were a tamer of horses, you were a fencer, a high school chess champion, an actor. You are American, Japanese, Korean, and by being all of those things, you are not truly any of those things. You consider yourself a citizen of the world.”
p.285 – “You are currently a citizen of a hospital. A machine is breathing for you. Regularly spaced chirps indicate that you are still alive.”
p.285 – " ‘I know you already,’ you replied. ‘I’ve played two of your games.’ "
p.289 – " ‘What weapon?’ you say. You have no weapons. You have lived an easy life that has required no defenses of any kind. Your privilege probably makes you reckless. ‘I’m going to have a conversation. I’m sure this will just turn out to be a person who needs someone to listen to them.’ "
p.290 – “But now, here Sadie is, telling a doctor that she is your wife. If you could speak, you would say to her, ‘All I had to do was fall into a coma for you to marry me. If only I’d known it was so easy.’ "
pp.292-293 – “An NPC is a character that is not playable by a gamer. It is an AI extra that gives a programmed world verisimilitude. The NPC can be a best friend, a talking computer, a child, a parent, a lover, a robot, a gruff platoon leader, or the villain. Sam, however, means this as an insult– in addition to calling you unimportant, he’s saying you’re boring and predictable. But the fact is, there is no game without the NPCs.”
p.293 – " ‘I love you, brother. You’re my best friend.’ You pay the bar tab, and you help Sam up to his room. He goes into the bathroom, and he closes his door, and then you hear him throwing up.”
p.299 – “Sam walks over to the bed, and he studies your face. ‘No, Marx always knew everything about everything.’ When you figured out Sam’s dead mother’s name, you decided that it was fate, and from that day forward, Sam would be your brother. A name is destiny, if you think it is.”
p.301 – “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.”
p.310 – " ‘How did we get through?’ Bong Cha had been baffled by Sam’s question. ‘We got up in the morning,’ she said finally. ‘We went to work. We went to the hospital. We came home. We went to sleep. We did it again.’ "
p.311 – " ‘Okay, so you spoke to her. She was definitely not a ghost. Did she ever reply?’ "
p.311 – " ‘Yes, in my mind, she did. I knew your mother so well I coud play her part. The same with my own mother and my grandmother and my chilhood best friend, Euna, who drowned in the lake by her cousin’s house. There are no ghosts, but up here’– she gestured toward her head– ‘it’s a haunted house.’ "
p.322 – “What would Marx say?”
p.322 – “Sam, it’s not so difficult as you think. People want to be comforted, and then, honestly, they want to carry on. Tell them that it’s safe to go back to the office, and that their seemingly frivolous work is still worth doing in the face of a random, violent universe.”
p.322 – “Start with an anecdote. A funny story about me. Thank them for coming back and mean it. That’s all you have to do. You make everything harder than it needs to be. You always have.”
p.325 – " ‘Snap out of it, Sadie. Come to the office. We work through our pain. That’s what we do. We put the pain into the work, and the work becomes better. But you have to participate. You have to talk to me. You can’t ignore me and our company and everything that came before. Everything isn’t over because Marx is dead.’ "
p.327 – " ‘You’re kidding, right? God, I miss Marx. Hmm, why throw a party? I don’t know, we finished the game. We survived the last year. They tried to kill us, they nearly broke us, but we’re still bloody here! Why does anyone ever throw a party?’ "
p.330 – " ‘Still, I think there’s something here,’ Ant insisted. ‘These images make me feel… I don’t know the word. I guess they make me feel.’ "
p.331 – " ‘I love that world more, I think, because it is perfectible. Because I have perfected it. The actual world is the random garbage fire it always is. There’s not a goddamn thing I can do about the actual world’s code.’ He laughed at himself, then looked at Sam. ‘How are you doing?’ "
p.333 – " ‘No, I like this, but I don’t know if I understand it yet,’ Sam said. ‘Why don’t you tell me how you see it?’ "
p.335 – “Sam didn’t believe it was possible to spoil a game. The point was not what happened, but the process of getting to what happened.”
p.336 – “To make his case, Marx jumped up on a kitchen chair and recited the “Tomorrow” speech for them, which he knew by heart:”

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

p.336 – " ‘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.338 – “Keep it simple, Sadie said. That’s always served you well. I’m hte one who always makes games too complicated. Maybe you could even use the Mapleworld engines. There’s no reason you shouldn’t. They probably have one or two more games in them before they’re completely obsolete.”
p.338 – " ‘I’m going to take notes,’ Sam said.”
p.343 – “Gifting was an important part of the culture of Friendship, and she felt shamed into reciprocation. She took to presenting her neighbors with rocks, the one product her farm produced in abundance.”
pp.343-344 – " ‘Good for you. This town is relentless in its desire to pair people up. I am tired of the combining of property, which is inevitable followed by the separation of property. And in these transactions, one will inevitably end up with less than one started with.’ "
p.348 – “They did have a secret. The secret was the delight one feels when discovering a person who speaks one’s native tongue.”
p.352 – " ‘Daedalus, I have found that the most intimate relationships allow for a great deal of privacy within them.’ "
p.352 – " ‘My life was quite easy for a long time,’ Emily said. ‘It would be a lie to pretend that I have suffered more than anyone else. I had work I liked and was considered somewhat good at. But my partner died, and now I detest my work, and I have been blue. More than blue really. I have been in the depths of despair. My grandfather, Fred, who I adored, recently died. It begins to seem to me that life is little more than a series of losses, and as you must know by now, I hate losing. And I suppose I came to Friendship because I no longer wished to be in the place I lived and sometimes I no longer wished to even be in my body.’ "
p.353 – " ‘The most important thing is finding someone you wish to play with.’ "
p.356 – " ‘I think it is natural to want to know the boundaries of your world,’ Daedalus said. ‘We should encourage him in his explorations. He is a strong child, and he cannot hurt himself very badly.’ "
p.363 – " ‘Don’t worry, my love. You aren’t real, so you can’t die.’ "
p.372 – " ‘Here is a thing to admit to yourself, if you’re able: there will never be a person who can mean as much to you as Sam. You may as well let go of the garbage–’ "
p.373 – " ‘Inevitable,’ Dov said. ‘I’m fucking awful. I would never be in a relationship with me. The only good thing is that we didn’t add children into the mess this time.’ "
p.374 – " ‘There are brilliant casual games made all the time, even though people think of casual games as a lesser form. I play every sort of game myself. There are great games to be made for phones, just as there are great games to be made for PCs and consoles. I don’t expect your work to be super finished. I expect all of us to be honest and to treat each other with respect. It takes a lot of courage to put a game out there. As a designer, I’ve probably failed more than I’ve succeeded. And the one thing I didn’t know when I was your age was how much I was going to fail. Sorry if that’s a depressing note to end my introductory spiel on.’ "
p.376 – " ‘Something I’ve learned is that when you don’t have many resources, you have to be even more rigorous with your style. Limitations are style if you make them so.’ "
pp.377-378 – " ‘I guess the question I had was, how did you get from making something like Solution to making something like Ichigo not that much later? How did you get from there to here? That’s what I don’t know how to do.’ "
p.378 – “When she had downloaded Pioneers, she didn’t notice anything about who had made it or have specific expectations for what the game would be. She had been postpartum, fuzzy brained, depressed, and alone, and she had turned to games for comfort, in the same way people to turn to food. She favored casual games, the kind of thing that could be played while she was distracted with the business of keeping herself and brand-new, insatiable creature alive.”
p.381 – “She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon th person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.”
p.382 – “A good game designer knows that clinging to a few early ideas about a project can cut off the potential for the work. Sadie did not feel that Naomi was altogether a person yet, which was another thing that one could not admit. So many of the mothers she knew said that their children were exactly themselves from the moment they appeared in the world.”
p.383 – " ‘Samson, you are a lucky boy,’ Dong Hyun said to Sam in a perfectly clear voice. ‘You have had tragedy, yes, but you have had many good friends as well.’ "
p.384 – “For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Or course, you goddamn did.”
p.387 – " ‘More yours,’ Sadie said. ‘I think that’s been established. Considering my many concerns about credit, it turns out that no one remembers who’s responsible for anything.’ "
p.389 – “How quickly you go from being the youngest to the oldest person in the room, she thought.”
p.391 – " ‘I disagree,’ Sadie said. ‘People play games for the characters, not for the tech. Have you been playing anything great?’ "
p.392 – " ‘You know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking how easy it was to make that first Ichigo. We were like machines then– this, this, this, this. It’s so easy to make a hit when you’re young and you don’t know anything.’ "
p.393 – " ‘How can you not know this? Lovers are… common.’ She studied Sam’s face. ‘Because I loved working with you better than I liked the idea of making love to you. Because true collaborators in this life are rare.’ "
p.394 – " ‘If their traumas are the most interesting things about them, how do they get over any of it?’ Sam asked."
p.394 – " ‘We were lucky to be born when we were.’ "
p.394 – " ‘…; the industry got so professional. We couldn’t have done as much as we did on our own. We could never have made a game that we could sell to a company like Opus on the resources we had. We wouldn’t have made Ichigo Japanese, because we would have worried about the fact that we weren’t Japanese. And I think, because of the internet, we would have been overwhelmed by how many people were trying to do the exact same things we were. We had so much freedom– creatively, technically. No one was watching us, and we weren’t even watching ourselves. What we had was our impossibly high standards, and your completely theoretical conviction that we could make a great game.’ "
p.395 – " ‘…And even Freda– God, I miss Freda– was fed up with me. She was like, ‘Mine Sadie, bad things happen to everyone. Enough already.’ But after Pioneers, I wasn’t able to feel quite as terrible about things. The main thing it made me feel was not quite so alone. I don’t think I’ve ever properly thanked you.’ "
p.395 – “The work had been hers, yes, but it had equally been his. It had been theirs, and it wouldn’t have existed without the both of them. This was a tautology that had only taken her the better part of two decades to understand.”