Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Should have. Would have. Could have. Didn’t.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

2. “Let’s stay young forever. Young, stupid, and pretty. Sounds like a plan, don’t you think?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

3. “Someday, we’ll run into each other again, I know it. Maybe I’ll be older and smarter and just plain better. If that happens, that’s when I’ll deserve you. But now, at this moment, you can’t hook your boat to mine, because I’m liable to sink us both.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

4. “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.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

5. “Why do two people fall in love? It’s a mystery.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

6. “No one travels without purpose. Those who are lost wish to be lost.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

7. “You don’t choose a book the book chooses you.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

8. “In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know. For everyone else, it’s just another end.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

9. “But I believe good things happen everyday. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that’s life, isn’t it?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

10. “Sometimes books don’t find us until the right time.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

11. “You can’t avoid orphan stories, child. Every story is an orphan story. We are all orphaned sooner or later.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

12. “To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

13. “Maybe we’ll meet again, when we are slightly older and our minds less hectic, and I’ll be right for you and you’ll be right for me. But right now, I am chaos to your thoughts and you are poison to my heart.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

14. “Death is a state of mind – many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

15. “It was such a sweet, sad song with such sweet, sad lyrics. Old-fashioned a little, but also timeless.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

16. “It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

17. “A life isn’t measured in hours and minutes. It’s the quality, not the length.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

18. “Saying you’re through with romance is like saying you’re done with living, Betty. Life is better with a little romance, you know.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

Featured in: Romance Quotes

19. “We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

20. “I have so much paperwork. I’m afraid my paperwork has paperwork.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

21. “We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

Featured in: Reading Quotes

22. “You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

23. “There’s a pleasure to loving someone even when you know there’s no chance in them loving you back. The pain I felt let me know I was still alive.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

24. “You tell a kid he doesn’t like to read, and he’ll believe you.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

25. “My brain said no. But my heart!”

— Gabrielle Zevin

26. “Wounds are like water set to boil – they heal best left unwatched...”

— Gabrielle Zevin

27. “A place isn’t a place until it has a bookstore.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

28. “It wasn’t even 8:00 yet. Pretty early for such deep thoughts.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

29. “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.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

30. “It’s easier to be happy than to be sad. Being sad takes alot of work. It’s exhausting.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

31. “The boredom you speak of, it is what most of us call happiness.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

32. “The kind of people who spend their lives as permanent guests on a futon are not the kind of people you want to know.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

33. “A good game designer knows that clinging to a few early ideas about a project can cut off the potential for the work.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

34. “In games, the thing that matters most is the order of things. The game has an algorithm, but the player also must create a play algorithm in order to win. There is an order to any victory. There is an optimal way to play any game.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

35. “Shinto tradition, a gate represented passing from the mundane to the sacred.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

36. “Isn’t that the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

37. “What I think you should consider,” Alabaster said, “is the rarity of finding a playmate in either this world or the other world.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

38. “To make a game is to imagine the person playing it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

39. “Love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

40. “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.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

41. “Ah, but Sadie Green was a gamer! In a game, if a sign warns you not to open a certain door, you will definitely open that door. If it doesn’t work out, you can always go back to the save point and start again.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

42. “They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

43. “And when she dreams, she dreams of a girl who was lost at sea but one day found the shore.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

44. “Always remember, mine Sadie: life is very long, unless it is not.” Sadie knew this to be a tautology, but it also happened to be true.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

45. “On, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that’s not how it works. A human life is a beautiful mess.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

46. “People, you’ll find, aren’t usually all good or bad. Sometimes they’re just a little bit good and a whole lot bad. And sometimes they’re mostly good with a dash of bad. And most of us, well, we fall in the middle somewhere.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

47. “Oh, all stories are the same, aren’t they? Men and women fall in love or out of love. People are born; people die. It al ends happily or it all ends sadly, and the difference matters only to the people involved.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

48. “Diving is a leap of faith plus gravity.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

49. “On Elsewhere we fool ourselves into thinking we know what will be just because we know the amount of time we have left. We know this, but we never really know what will be. We never know what will happen...”

— Gabrielle Zevin

50. “I’m allergic to sad memories. It’s the worst.”

— Gabrielle Zevin