Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2024 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. “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

8. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

15. “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

16. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

20. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

22. “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

23. “My brain said no. But my heart!”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

27. “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

28. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

36. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

38. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

40. “No one actually needs another person or another person’s love to survive. Love is when we have irrationally convinced ourselves that we do.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

41. “We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

42. “True conviction is believing something to be right even after it becomes disadvantageous to you.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

43. “The scent is sweet and meloncholy. A bit like dying, a bit like falling in love.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

44. “I let myself feel good and sorry for myself, but only for a second. Daddy always said that the most useless of all human emotions was self-pity.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

45. “Betty inhales sharply, ‘It’s just I thought I had lost you forever.’ Oh, Betty, don’t you know there’s no such thing as forever?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

46. “Love stories are written in millimeters and milliseconds with a fast, dull pencil whose marks you can barely see, they are written in miles and eons with a chisel on the side of a mountiantop.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

47. “Did you know that there are over three hundred words for love in canine?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

48. “It’s like when you take a trip with someone you don’t know very well. Sometimes, you can get very close very quickly, but then after the trip is over, you realize all that was a false sort of closeness. An intimacy based on the trip more than the travelers.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

49. “The words you can’t find, you borrow.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

50. “I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart.”

— Gabrielle Zevin