Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him. Apparently I could.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

61. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

63. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

67. “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

68. “We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

75. “Before I liked to write, I liked to type. I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

76. “Teachers assign it, and parents are happy because their kids are reading something of ‘quality.’ But it’s forcing kids to read books like that that make them think they hate reading.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

77. “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

78. “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

79. “People are capable of great, great change during the span of one lifetime. And women even more than men.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

80. “She was pretty and smart, which makes her death a tragedy. She was poor and black, which means people say they saw it coming.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

81. “A place is not really a place without a bookstore.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

82. “Nadie viaja sin motivo. Quien se pierde es porque desea perderse.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

83. “If you are going to forgive a person, Liz decides, it is best to do it sooner rather than later. Later, Liz knows from experience, could be sooner than you thought.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

84. “But me-also-thinks my latter-day reaction speaks to the necessity of encountering stories at precisely the right time in our lives. Remember, Maya: the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

85. “People tell boring lies about politics, God, and love. You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

86. “His heart is too full, and no words to release it. I know what words do, he thinks. They let us feel less.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

87. “Sometimes things seem so unbearable in the middle of the night, don’t they? In the middle of the night, we’re all such children.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

88. “In you, I found infinity. In you, I was reborn.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

90. “I chanced upon “The Luck of Roaring Camp” again a couple of years ago and I cried so much you’ll find that my Dover Thrift Edition is waterlogged. Methinks I have grown soft in my middle age. But me-also-thinks my latter-day reaction speaks to the necessity of encountering stories at precisely the right time in our lives. Remember, Maya: the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

91. “Every book is a world.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

92. “The things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

93. “My grandmother was married for fifty-two years, until my grandfather died. She used to say that a bad marriage was one that hadn’t had enough time to get good again.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

94. “It was funny how dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or the other. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

95. “I wondered if the person who really loves you is the person who knows all your stories, the person who WANTS to know all your stories.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

96. “He felt comfortable and broken-in like favourite jeans.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

97. “No one, not even the rain has such soft hands.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

98. “Tragedy is when someone ends up dead. Everything else is just a bump in the road. For the record, that was something Daddy used to say.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

99. “Most people’s problems would be solved if they would only give more things a chance.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

100. “He told me that love was the only thing that really mattered in the world.”

— Gabrielle Zevin