Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “He is folding cranes so that your mother can string them. This is marriage.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

452. “Let her know you’re there. And if you can manage it, bring her a cookie, a book, a movie to watch. Friendship,” Marx said, “is kind of like having a Tamagotchi.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

454. “The awareness gave him pause: perhaps a funny-looking mixed-race kid could exist at the center of the world, not just on its periphery.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

455. “Marx’s favorite adjective was “interesting.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

456. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

458. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

463. “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

464. “This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

465. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

476. “And in the end, she had decided she preferred being his creative partner to being his lover. There were so many people who could be your lover, but, if she was honest with herself, there were relatively few people who could move you creatively.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

478. “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

479. “Zweisamkeit’ is the feeling of being alone even when you’re with other people.” Simon turned to.”

— 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. “Life was expensive anywhere you were.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

484. “How to explain to Destiny that the thing that made her work leap forward in 1996 was that she had been a dervish of selfishness, resentment, and insecurity? Sadie had willed herself to be great: art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

485. “A second later, he put on his Breton cap.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

486. “Then there are the books I teach every year: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Johnny Got His Gun, A Farewell to Arms, A Prayer for Owen Meany, some years Wuthering Heights, Silas Marner, Their Eyes Were Watching God, or I Capture the Castle. Those books are like old friends.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

487. “The body part that worked consistently well for Sam was his brain, and he was not going to compromise it. Because of this experience, Sam often suffered through pain that probably should have and could have been somewhat ameliorated.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

488. “Sam fully got what she was trying to do, but he also believed that she would have to do more if she were to make games that people loved, not just games that people admired.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

489. “I catch myself. It’s not that bad. But I occasionally switch a word with another word.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

490. “An e-reader! I’ve wanted one for a really long time.” She shoots a quick look over to her father. He nods, though his eyebrow is twitching slightly. “Thanks, Nana.” Maya kisses her grandmother on the cheek.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

491. “Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

492. “I’m bad. I married a bad man, too. And I know that bad people deserve what they get, but oh, how we hate to be alone.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

494. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

496. “If we did not mark the days, we would not know how much we had survived.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

497. “You are a gaming person, which is to say you are the kind of person who believes that “game over” is a construction. The game is only over if you stop playing. There is always one more life. Even the most brutal death isn’t final.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

498. “You are American, Japanese, Korean and by being all of those things, you are not truly any of those things.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

499. “If someone tells you there will be trouble, believe them.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

500. “The Call of the Wild.”

— Gabrielle Zevin