How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"All I ever wanted was for her to love me and to do something meaningful with my life. And look. I mean, look," he said. (2.8)
Tear. Colin's thoughts on love are so profound and deep, but we can't help but wonder whether this is actually what he feels, or just what he wants to feel. Why does he just want to be loved by a Katherine? Why not just be loved?
Quote #2
Perhaps, then, Colin ought to have grown accustomed to it, to the rise and fall of relationships. Dating, after all, only ends one way: poorly. If you think about it, and Colin often did, all romantic relationships end in either (1) breakup, (2) divorce, or (3) death. (3.28)
Way to cheer us up, man. All relationships end so don't even bother is pretty much the message. That's one way to look at it, but another is that all relationships can teach us something or make us feel something that still make them worth it… even with all the heartbreak and tears.
Quote #3
With all the nasty back-and-forth, Colin fought the urge to ask Katherine whether she still loved him, because the only thing she hated more than his saying she didn't understand was his asking whether she still loved him. He fought the urge and fought it and fought it. For seven seconds. (5.85)
That's a reeeeeaaaallllly long time to wait… Oh wait—it look longer than seven seconds to read that sentence. That's the whole point: Colin is so impatient and needy when it comes to love. He can't just leave Katherine alone for one minute without asking her if she loves him, which sounds both pretty insecure and pretty annoying.
Quote #4
The Theorem rests upon the validity of my long-standing argument that the world contains precisely two kinds of people: Dumpers and Dumpees. Everyone is predisposed to being either one or the other, but of course not all people are COMPLETE Dumpers or Dumpees. (7.40)
Colin soon finds out that even he isn't a total dumpee—he dumped K-3, making him not firmly in one category or the other either. Hmm… perhaps that's no coincidence. Over the course of the novel, Colin's definition and understanding of love grows as he begins to work, solve, and dispute his theorem.
Quote #5
But it only took a few more Katherines for him to look back nostalgically upon The Great One as the perfect spokesperson for the Katherine Phenomenon. Their three-minute relationship was the thing itself in its most unadulterated form. It was the immutable tango between the Dumper and the Dumpee: the coming and the seeing and the conquering and the returning home. (7.90)
It's no wonder Colin's got a messed-up love life: he's basing his whole relationship beliefs on a mini-relationship that happened when he was a kid. It's the Katherine that begins it all, and the one that makes him jumble all women up in his head until he can't tell them apart any more.
Quote #6
"My Theorem will tell the story. Each graph with a beginning and a middle and an end."
"There's no romance in geometry," Lindsey answered. "Just you wait." (9.113-114)
Colin's confident that his theorem will be able to tell the story that romance can't on its own. Lindsey, on the other hand, is confident he is wrong. The question is: at the end of the novel, who is right?
Quote #7
He remained convinced that romantic behavior was basically monotonous and predictable, and that therefore one could write a fairly straight forward formula that would predict the collision course of any two people. But he was worried that he might not be enough of a genius to make the connections. He just couldn't imagine a way to correctly predict the other Katherines without screwing up the ones he'd already gotten down pat. (10.27)
The fact that Colin thinks of all romance as the same is why he runs into trouble when it comes to the ladies department. No two relationships are the same, but Colin thinks love can be wrapped up neatly with a bow, packaged and translated into a series of numbers. But it just doesn't work like that.
Quote #8
You can love someone so much, he thought. But you can never love people as much as you can miss them. (10.31)
This is one of the most important lines in the book. Why? Because it's so telling about how Colin feels about the Katherines. He may spend most of his life moping over one of them leaving him, claiming he wants her back, but what he's really bummed about is not having that person around any more. He's not still loving her necessarily—he's wanting her to still be around because he misses her. Now that's deep.
Quote #9
"I was thinking about this girl you love so much," she said. "And this place I love so much. And how that happens. How you can just fall into it. This land Hollis is selling, the thing about it is—well, I'm partly mad because I don't want there to be some bulls*** McMansion subdivision up there, but also partly because my secret hideout is up there." (13.86)
Sure, there are different types of love. There's the kind you have for your GF or BF and then there's the type you have for your secret hideaway in the woods. So what do they have in common? Lindsey seems to think it's the process of actually falling in love. It just happens, and before you know it, it's already too late: you're in love whether you wanted to be or not.
Quote #10
Well, he doesn't love me now. We've been dating for two years and he's never once said it. But he would really not love me if he could see inside. Because he's so real about everything. I mean, you can say a lot of s*** about Colin, but he is completely himself. He's going to work in that factory his whole life, and he's going to have the same friends, and he's really happy with that, and he thinks it matters. But if he knew. (14.53)
Lindsey's sure of it—TOC isn't in love with her because he doesn't know the real her that's around when the performances stop. We might say the same thing about Colin. He's not truly in love with a Katherine because he can't even remember anything about her, aside from that she dumped him (and even that's not always true).