Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Marx’s favorite adjective was “interesting.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

452. “I worry for you. If you love everyone, you’ll end up having hurt feelings most of the time.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

453. “When I read a book, I want you to be reading it at the same time. I.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

454. “Why make anything if you don’t believe it could be great?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

455. “Sam knew that Sadie knew that he loved her. Sadie knew that Sam loved her in the same way she knew that Sam had not seen the Magic Eye.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

456. “It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us,” the passage goes, “but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down a road. And someday, you do not know when, he, or indeed she, will be there. You will be loved because for the first time in your life, you will truly not be alone. You will have chosen to not be alone.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

457. “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

458. “The loss of his mind has turned out to be a curiously pain-free process. He feels that it ought to hurt more.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

459. “Computers are great for experimentation, but they’re bad for deep thinking.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

461. “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

462. “Maya, If you’re stuck, reading helps: “The Beauties” by Anton Chekhov, “The Doll’s House” by Katherine Mansfield, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J. D. Salinger, “Brownies” or “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” both by ZZ Packer, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” by Amy Hempel, “Fat” by Raymond Carver, “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway. We should have them all downstairs. Just ask if you can’t find anything, though you know where everything is better than I. Love, Dad.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

463. “It is relatively easy to pack up your life when you’re twenty-three, and Sadie was significantly finished by the time Dov returned from the break.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

464. “Sadie was not a natural mother, though this was not a confession one was allowed to make. She craved solitude and personal space too much. But she loved this girl nonetheless.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

465. “I mean, I’m not not a feminist. I mean, I believe I’m a human before I’m a woman.” You say this because you are young, and because you have the wrong idea about feminism.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

467. “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

468. “And eventually, Sadie would be a stranger. And this would be a disaster for Sam. A tragedy. He would know that if he hadn’t been the person he was, terrified and cowardly and petty and insecure and sexually panicked and broken, Sadie might have been his.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

469. “These were his strawberries. These were birds he knew. No designer had ever used red or yellow in an indigo discharge dyeing technique before. He must have had to start over many times to get the colors right. This fabric is not just a fabric. It’s the story of failure and of perseverance, of the discipline of a craftsman, of the life of an artist.” Sadie caressed the.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

470. “The best you can wish for anyone is a video game death. Which is to say, spectacular and brief.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

472. “It was a fine speech from a putz.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

473. “He hasn’t said more than two words to anyone in the six weeks since he was injured. He’s been in terrible pain, and he’ll probably have to be in and out of the hospital for a very long time. It was a big deal that he talked to you.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

474. “Los Angeles, he decided, was a profoundly stupid city, and he felt a palpable, if irrational, longing for all things Massachusetts.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

475. “Tell me I don’t know you, Sam thought. Tell me I don’t know you when I could draw both sides of this hand, your hand, from memory.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

476. “With his sweet, roundish face, light-colored eyes, and mix of white and Asian features, Sam looked almost exactly like an anime character. Astro Boy, or one of the wisecracking little brothers of manga.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

477. “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

478. “Come on, Sadie. There’ll always be another class. How many times can you look at something and know that everyone around you is seeing the same thing or at the very least that their brains and eyes are responding to the same phenomenon? How much proof do you ever have that we’re all in the same world?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

479. “Though you cannot see him, you become aware of the fact that your father is sitting on the floor. He is folding cranes so that your mother can string them. This is marriage.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

480. “Emily was five months pregnant when she decided to open the bookstore. Friendship didn’t have one, and it would be a way for Emily to read more and farm less. She sold off her farm equipment at a 50 percent loss and she rented out her unused land to Alabaster. Emily allocated most of her remaining gold to the construction of a small building in town. She named the store Friendship Books.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

481. “Marx’s life had been filled with such abundance that he was one of those people who found it natural to care for those around him.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

482. “Still, she is glad for the diversion and she doesn’t want to become the kind of person who thinks that good news can only come from calls one was already expecting and callers one already knows.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

484. “Something I’ve learned is that when you don’t have many resources, you have to be even more rigorous with your style. Limitations are style if you make them so.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

486. “We had both heard worse. People were often the worst versions of themselves in the months leading up to a wedding. Occasionally, though, the worst version of someone was the actual version of someone, but it was difficult to know if one was in that situation until after the fact.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

487. “In this world, to be overly literal is a profound weakness.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

488. “Yes, I read it,” she replies. “I most certainly did read it. It kept me up all night, I was so angry with it. At this stage of my life, I would rather not be kept up all night. Nor do I wish to have my tears jerked at the rate at which this novel jerked them. The next time you recommend a book to me, I hope you’ll keep that in mind, Mr. Fikry.” “I will,” he says. “And I do apologize, Mrs. Cumberbatch. Most of our customers have rather liked The Book Thief.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

489. “The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

490. “This is the most violent poetry game I’ve ever played,′ Marx said.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

491. “The greatest pleasures of his life had been when he was by her side, playing or inventing. And how could she not feel that as well? There would never be another Sadie, and now this one was lost to him.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

493. “There would be leaves in the fall, and snow in the winter, and cherry blossoms in the spring. The world had always looked painfully beautiful to him when he was sick. It was only when he was alone and he couldn’t participate in the business of living that he tended to notice how lovely being alive was.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

494. “It wasn’t illegal, but it was possibly immoral,” Ruby said. “Maybe it wasn’t immoral, but it was definitely disloyal. Maybe – ” “Never mind, this seems terribly complicated,” said Embeth. “Let’s put a pin in that.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

495. “I wish I had what you and Grandma have.” “You have different things,” Dong Hyun said. “You were born into a different world than I was. Maybe you don’t need what Grandma and I have.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

496. “You get food from Costco. Those big muffins, maybe? My sister says they’ve got a thousand calories a piece.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

497. “Leemos para saber que no estamos solos. Leemos porque estamos solos. Leemos y no estamos solos. No estamos solos.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

499. “The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

500. “What a world. People once made glass sculptures of decay, and they put these sculptures in museums. How strange and beautiful human beings are. And how fragile.”

— Gabrielle Zevin