Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 2 of 10

51. “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

52. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

54. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

56. “Life is very long, unless it is not.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

57. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

60. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

62. “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

63. “So I will wait, because I would rather wait for you than waste my time with someone who isn’t you.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

64. “And I know that bad people deserve what they get, but oh, how we hate to be alone.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

65. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

67. “Oh, you don’t want to hear all my sad stories. I can’t even bear to tell them anymore. Screw the past, right?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

68. “Marx was a prodigious reader, and he felt like Sadie might be the kind of book that one could read many times, and always come away with something new.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

69. “The key to happiness in life is knowing when to keep your mouth shut.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

70. “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

71. “The rub of the Choose Your Own Adventure stories is that if you don’t make a few bad choices, the story will be terribly boring. If you do everything right and you’re always good, the story will be very short.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

72. “The truth is, sometimes too much can happen in a relationship, and then there’s nothing anyone can do or say. It’s broken.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

73. “It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

74. “That love is all there is; is all we know of love. It is enough; the freight should be proportioned to the groove.” What is the “freight”? he wondered. What is the “groove”?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

75. “It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him. Apparently I could.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

77. “I’ve been a police officer for twenty years now and I’ll tell you, pretty much every bad thing is life is a result of bad timing, and every good thing is the result of good timing.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

78. “My heart was a little bit broken, but I still had to go to school. I buttoned my dress shirt over it and my winter coat, too. I hoped it didn’t show too much.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

79. “There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backwards, she thinks. She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

80. “There is no purity to bearing pain alone.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

81. “I did learn something about insanity while I was down there. People go crazy, not because they are crazy, but because it’s the best available option at the time.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

82. “It was a nice day, and I don’t mean that it was sunny either. It was humid and not too cool, like winter was getting annoyed with itself and wanted it to be spring just as much as everyone else.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

83. “Love you madly, my sweet friend.” Love you madly. The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

84. “Eye contact made people think you were being truthful even if you weren’t.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

85. “Ask two people to tell you anything, you’ll get two versions. Even easy things like directions, let alone important or semi-controversial topics like why a fight started or what a person was generally like. If you don’t know something for yourself, you just can’t be sure.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

86. “There are many challenges to long distance running, but one of the greatest is the question of where to put on’s house keys.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

87. “You couldn’t be old and still be wrong about as many things as she’d been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

88. “The day my father shook my hand, I knew I was a writer.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

89. “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.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

90. “Remember: you are as good as you are tomorrow.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

91. “Daddy always said the only thing worth begging for was your life, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe sometimes your love is a little bit worth begging for, too.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

92. “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.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

93. “There are no ghosts, but up here” – she gestured toward her head – “it’s a haunted house.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

94. “Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you’re the only person in the room.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

95. “You call your mother. You’re in a panic, but as soon as your mother answers the phone, you relax. When your mother is worrying about something, it means that you won’t have to.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

96. “A glimmer of a notion of a nothing of a whisper of a figment of an idea.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

97. “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!”

— Gabrielle Zevin

98. “The best part of this moment, he thought, is that everything is still possible.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

99. “When we’re young we think everything has to be wrapped up in a month. But you should take the long view on this one. Before you make a move, be sure, Anya. And even once you’re sure, tread carefully. And remember you don’t have to do what they expect you to do” -Charles Delacroix.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

100. “The words of Anders Larsson came back to him: “To be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin