Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “This is the most violent poetry game I’ve ever played,′ Marx said.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

452. “Ismay has aged like an actress should: from Juliet to Ophelia to Gertrude to Hecate.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

453. “The coyotes felt capable, canny, and strangely anthropomorphized, as if they had been endowed with human features by a team of animators. Their hair seemed artfully disheveled, the haircut of a hot, young actor playing a drug addict in an independent film. The coyotes felt more human than most of the humans Sam encountered, more human than Sam himself felt back then.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

454. “The lines mean that one doesn’t have to be a god or a king for your life to have meaning.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

455. “I’ve been blue, lately,” Sam admitted. “And I wondered, how do you get over that sort of thing?” “Work helps,” Sadie said. “Games help. But sometimes, when I’m really low, I keep a particular image in my mind.” “What is it?” “I imagine people playing. Sometimes, it’s one of our games, but sometimes, it’s any game. The thing I find profoundly hopeful when I’m feeling despair is to imagine people playing, to believe that no matter how bad the world gets, there will always be players.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

456. “There is no Allison Springs, Maine, but I can attest to the reality of Boca Raton, Florida: I grew up there.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

457. “But sometimes, you have to make your game in the time that you have. If you’re always aiming for perfection, you won’t make anything at all.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

458. “I imagine people playing. Sometimes, it’s one of our games, but sometimes, it’s any game. The thing I find profoundly hopeful when I’m feeling despair is to imagine people playing, to believe that no matter how bad the world gets, there will always be players.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

459. “Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met – he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know – were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

460. “It would be so easy, Ismay thinks. You walk out. You swim for a while. You swim too far. You don’t try to swim back. Your lungs fill up. It hurts for a bit, but then it’s over. Nothing ever hurts again, and your conscience is clear. You don’t leave a mess. Maybe your body washes up some day. Maybe it doesn’t.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

461. “Sadie,” he said. “Do you know why I want to make a game?” “Of course. Because you foolishly think it will make you rich and famous.” “No. It’s very simple. I want to make something that will make people happy.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

462. “Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

463. “But because he had been mostly raised in Asia, he had been completely sheltered from the kind of racism that Asians experienced in America.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

464. “Visto che siamo al mondo, stiamo tutti morendo.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

465. “He would know her handwriting anywhere.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

466. “A name is destiny, if you think it is.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

467. “No, this is a great game. That’s Cobainus. The eleven stars of Cobainus form a fuzzy grandma sweater,” Marx said.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

468. “Never use someone else’s engine, if you can help it,” Dov warned. “You cede too much power to them.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

469. “It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she had arrived. But life was always arriving.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

470. “She liked going to bed early and waking up early. She liked working. She liked that she was good at her work, and she felt proud of the fact that she was well paid for it. She felt pleasure in orderly things – a perfectly efficient section of code, a closet where every item was in its place. She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

471. “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.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

472. “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.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

473. “I forget how young you are. You’re still at the age where you mistake your friends and your colleagues for family.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

474. “If Sadie and Sam had been lovers, Sadie was certain she would have been seen as Sam’s helpmate, and not as an artist in her own right. Many people saw her that way already.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

475. “Sometimes I feel like the wedding is a Trojan horse. The dream I peddle to distract from the reality of a marriage. They choose these things to distinguish themselves from everyone else. They choose these things to make themselves feel less ordinary. But is there anything more ordinary than choosing to get married?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

476. “The most important thing is finding someone you wish to play with.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

477. “Lights, bright enough to dilate her eyes. Horns, flaccid and come too late. Metal crumpling like tissue. The body was not in pain but only because the body was gone, elsewhere. Yes, Daniel thinks just after impact but before death, like that. The passage hadn’t been as bad as he had thought.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

478. “Hey, pretty girl. How you doing?” “Adopted,” she says.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

479. “Yes, she loved him, but she also liked him. She liked herself when she was with him.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

480. “There were smart people, yes. There were people with whom you might have a decent conversation for twenty minutes. But to find someone who you wanted to talk to for 609 hours – that was rare. Even Marx – Marx was devoted, creative, and bright, but he was not Sadie.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

481. “As Sam often said to Sadie, “Why make anything if you don’t believe it could be great?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

482. “Alice would only have to be in the hospital for two nights this time, and it was only out of, according to her mother, “an abundance of caution.” It reminded her of a murder of crows, a flock of seagulls, a pack of wolves. 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.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

483. “The Fall of the House of Usher’ is a fair primer on what not to do with children.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

484. “She feels very sorry for her mother because people who don’t wake up can’t go downstairs to the bookstore in the morning.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

485. “He was nearly to the subway’s escalator when he turned back to see what the crowd had been looking at. Sam could imagine reporting the congestion in the train station, and Marx saying, “Weren’t you even curious what it was? There’s a world of people and things, if you can manage to stop being a misanthrope for a second.” Sam didn’t like Marx thinking of him as a misanthrope, even if he was one, and so, he turned. That was when he espied his old comrade, Sadie Green.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

486. “I think I don’t like children because I hated being young.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

487. “Promise me you’ll always forgive me, and I promise I’ll always forgive you.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

488. “Anders Larsson, was standing over him, looking like a blond Jesus in North Face.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

489. “I fail in my work every day, but I keep turning over the problems until I’m not failing anymore. But public failures are different, it’s true.” “So, what do I do?” she asked. “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.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

490. “But then he reminded himself: They are not only my friends. They are my colleagues. He had turned them into his colleagues, and in a strange way, that was comforting to Sam. Ichigo bonded them to him for life.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

491. “She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one pace and were entering another.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

492. “On the third day, he brought a library copy of the novel Galatea 2.2, which he had recently enjoyed.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

493. “Her voice sounds like a firefly looks on a summer night.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

494. “What is a ‘programmer’?” Emily asked. “A programmer is a diviner of possible outcomes, and a seer of unseen worlds.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

495. “Infinite Jest is a masterpiece,” Harvey had said. “Infinite Jest is an endurance contest.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

496. “A nostalgia for something that had never been? An envy at their intimacy? She wondered what it would have been like if Sam had been her lover.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

497. “While Sadie experienced this period of indecision as stressful, Sam didn’t feel that way at all. The best part of this moment, he thought, is that everything is still possible.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

498. “Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a novel steeped in nostalgia and innovation that follows three friends as they come of age in the world of video games, creating stories and worlds that enhance, redefine, and preserve their rich bonds while attempting to defy the limits of mortality.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

499. “No somos las cosas que acumulamos, adquirimos, leemos. Durante el tiempo que nos es dado vivir, somos solo amor. Las cosas que hemos amado. Las personas que hemos amado. Eso, es lo que realmente perdura.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

500. “He passed out, for the second time that winter. “We should stop running into each other like this,” he said to no one.”

— Gabrielle Zevin