Quotes from Just One Day

Gayle Forman ·  369 pages

Rating: (70.1K votes)


“Part of me knows one more day won't do anything except postpone the heartbreak. But another part of me believes differently. We are born in one day. We die in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“Sometimes the best way to find out what you’re supposed to do is by doing the thing you’re not supposed to do.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“You have to fall in love to be in love, but falling in love isn't the same as being in love”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“Or maybe it's not a miracle. Maybe this is just life. When you open yourself up to it. When you put yourself in the path of it. When you say yes.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“And that's when I understand that I have been stained. Whether I'm still in love with him, whether he was ever in love with me, and no matter who he's in love with now, Willem changed my life. He showed me how to get lost, and then I showed myself how to get found.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day



“I think everything is happening all the time, but if you don't put yourself in the path of it, you miss it.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“C'est courageux d'aller dans l'inconnu': It is courageous to go into territory unknown.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“Travelling's not something you're good at. It's something you do. Like breathing. You can't work too much at it, or it feels like work. You have to surrender yourself to the chaos. To the accidents.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“He showed me how to get lost, and then I showed myself how to get found.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“Sometimes you can only feel something by its absence. By the empty spaces it leaves behind.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day



“It's funny the things you think you're scared of until they're upon you, and then you're not.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“Stains are even worse when you're the only one who can see them.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“You're just trying on different identities, like everyone in those Shakespeare plays. And the people we pretend at, they're already in us. That's why we pretend them in the first place.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“I think you're the sort of person who finds money on the ground and waves it in the air and asks if anyone has lost it. I think you cry in movies that aren't even sad because you have a soft heart, though you don't let it show. I think you do things that scare you, and that makes you braver than those adrenaline junkies who bungee-jump off bridges.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“I realize then that it's not enough to know what someone is called. You have to know who they are.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day



“What is the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“But what if Shakespeare― and Hamlet― were asking the wrong question? What if the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“I don't know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don't want to be her anymore.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“You forget, time doesn't exist anymore. You gave it to me.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“...being Lulu, it made me realize that all my life I've been living in a small, square room, with no windows and no doors. And I was fine. I was happy, even. I thought. Then someone came along and showed me there was a door in the room. One that I'd never even seen before. Then he opened it for me. Held my hand as I walked through it. And for one perfect day, I was on the other side. I was somewhere else. Someone else. And then he was gone, and I was thrown back into my little room. And now, no matter what I do, I can't seem to find that door.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day



“I wait for the fist of devestation, the collapse of a year's worth of hopes, the roar of sadness. And I do feel it. The pain of losing him. Or the idea of him. But along with that pain is something else, something quiet at first, so I have to strain for it. but when I do, I hear the sound of a door quietly clicking shut. And then the most amazing thing happens: The night is calm, but I feel a rush of wind, as if a thousand other doors have just simultaneously flung open.
I give one last glance towards Willem. Then I turn to Wolfgang. "Finished," I say.
But I suspect the opposite is true. That really, I'm just beginning.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“We kiss again. This next kiss is the kind that breaks open the sky. It steals my breath and gives it back. It shows me that every other kiss I've had in my life has been wrong.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“When the sun shines, you let it shine on you”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“He looks at one of the pictures for a long time. Then he looks at me. "I'll keep you up here." He taps his temple. "Where you can't get lost.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“I want to undo this. To make it right. But I have no idea how. I don't seem to know how to open up to people without getting the door slammed in my face. So I do nothing.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day



“If these walls could talk, I wonder what secrets they'd tell.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“When I was little, I used to go to the local ice-skating rink. In my mind, I always felt like I could twirl and jump, but when I got out onto the ice, I could barely keep my blades straight. When I got older, that's how it was with people: In my mind, I am bold and forthright, but what comes out always seems to be so meek and polite. Even with Evan, my boyfriend for junior and most of senior year, I never quite managed to be that skating, twirling, leaping person I suspected I could be. But today, apparently, I can skate.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


“Even if you find him. Even if he didn't leave you on purpose, he can't possibly live up to the person you've built him into."

It's not like the thought hasn't occurred to me. I get that the chances of finding him are small, but the chances of finding him as I remember him are even smaller. But I just keep going back to what my dad always says, about how when you lose something, you have to visualize the last place you had it. And I found―and then lost―so many things in Paris.”
― Gayle Forman, quote from Just One Day


About the author

Gayle Forman
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