Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

455. “We had so much freedom – creatively, technically. No one was watching us, and we weren’t even watching ourselves. What we had was our impossibly high standards, and your completely theoretical conviction that we could make a great game.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

456. “Yo odio los libros de coleccionista. Toda esa gente que se vuelve loca por armazones de papel. Lo importante son las ideas, amigo. Las palabras.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

458. “But the best thing Marx did for them was this: He believed in them.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

460. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

462. “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

463. “I love you, Sadie,” Sam said. “I know, Sam. I love you, too.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

467. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

470. “When you have children, you’ll never be able to worry about a friend as much again,” Dov said. “I’m tired,” Sadie said. “I should go.” Sadie hung up the phone. She pulled Sam’s blanket over her head, and then she went to sleep.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

473. “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

474. “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

475. “Puedes tomar prestadas las palabras que no encuentras.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

476. “There is no purity in art. The process of how you arrive at something doesn’t matter at all.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

477. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

479. “She almost seemed to be an extension of him, and he, of her.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

481. “Sam was leaning on his good foot, in the increasingly lopsided way he had to stand, and Sadie felt a swelling of love and of worry for him – what was the difference in the end? It was never worth worrying about someone you didn’t love. And it wasn’t love if you didn’t worry.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

482. “I didn’t call you because I had met someone better, and when that didn’t work out, I decided to give you a second chance. So don’t be thinking you’re superior. You’ve got a decent smile, I’ll give you that, but your teeth are too big and so is your ass and you’re not twenty-five anymore even if you drink like you are. You shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

483. “He’s got one thick book. He’s in the middle of Infinite Jest. You ever heard of it?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

485. “Macbeth has just heard the news that his wife had died, and he is giving the most famous soliloquy from the play, the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

486. “The key to being a good thief, Sam always felt, was utter brazenness.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

487. “To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

488. “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

489. “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

490. “A great textile, like the William Morris Strawberry Thief, is a piece of art, but it takes a lot of time to make a piece of art. It isn’t simply design either. You have to understand the fabrics and what they can bear. You have to understand the dyeing process and how to achieve certain colors and what will make the color last through the ages. If you make a mistake, you might have to begin again.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

491. “He is folding cranes so that your mother can string them. This is marriage.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

492. “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

493. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

496. “Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

497. “And to see her almost made him want to cry. It was as if she were a mathematical proof that had eluded him for many years, but all at once, with fresh, well-rested eyes, the proof had a completely obvious solution. There’s Sadie, he thought. Yes.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

498. “Limitations are style if you make them so.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

499. “If it doesn’t work, all we’ve lost is a lot of time and money.” Sam laughed. “Let’s do this,” he said.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

500. “She had, he thought, one of the world’s great laughs. The kind of laugh where a person didn’t feel that he was being laughed at. The kind of laugh that was an invitation: I cordially invite you to join in this matter that I find amusing.”

— Gabrielle Zevin