Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

110. “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

111. “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

112. “It’s a tragic fact to die in an accident.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “The theme of the dance was “Great Romances,” or some such nonsense. There were projections of supposedly great couples from the past on the walls of the gym. Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Hermione and Ron, Bonnie and Clyde, etc.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

117. “This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

118. “My books can be divided into dog eras. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was begun in the era of Edie and Frank and completed in the era of Leia and Frank. Good dogs, all.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

119. “But I wondered if all this kissing was a bad habit with him and me. The thing we did with our mouths instead of talking.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

121. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

124. “His mistake had been in thinking the world would be filled with Sadie Greens, people like her. It was not.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

125. “To be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

126. “It’s hard to believe. Where does the times go?′ Betty sighs. ‘I’ve always hated that phrase. It makes it would like time went on a holiday, and is expected back any day now. Time flies is another one I hate. Apparently, time does quite a bit of traveling, though.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

127. “Promise me, we won’t ever do this again,” Sadie said. “Promise me, that no matter what happens, no matter what dumb thing we supposedly perpetrate on each other, we won’t ever go six years without talking to each other. Promise me you’ll always forgive me, and I promise I’ll always forgive you.” These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

128. “Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

129. “And then, despite the fact that A. J. does not believe in God, he closes his eyes and thanks whomever, the higher power, with all his porcupine heart.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

130. “Maya, we are what we love. We are that we love.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

131. “Did you have a ship?” Maya asks. “Yes. It had books on it, and it really was more of a research vessel. We studied a lot.” “You’re ruining this story.” “It’s a fact, Maya. There are murdering kinds of pirates and researching kinds of pirates, and your daddy was the latter.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

133. “You love being Ruby’s mother, but loving Ruby does not stop you from wanting things for yourself.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

134. “Liz looks at the tissue box, which is decorated with drawings of snowmen engaged in various holiday activities. One of the snowmen is happily placing a smiling rack of gingerbread men in an oven. Baking gingerbread men, or any cooking for that matter, is probably close to suicide for a snowman, Liz thinks. Why would a snowman voluntarily engage in an activity that would in all likelihood melt him? Can snowmen even eat? Liz glares at the box.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

135. “In a way, whoever you know in a certain place defines that place for you.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

136. “People knowing your private business gave them power over you” -Anya.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

137. “As the brain is detaching from the body, you think, How I will miss the horses.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

138. “Zweisamkeit’ is the feeling of being alone even when you’re with other people.” Simon turned to look in his husband’s eyes. “Before I met you, I felt this constantly. I felt it with my family, my friends, and every boyfriend I ever had. I felt it so often that I thought this was the nature of living. To be alive was to accept that you were fundamentally alone.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

139. “It’s a weakness to apologize before hearing what the other person’s grievances are. You don’t want to end up creating new grievances where there were none to begin with. Another Daddy-ism, if you hadn’t already guessed.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

140. “There’s something kind of heroic about being a bookseller.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

141. “The one real fight they’d ever had was over David Foster Wallace.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

142. “Pregnant, she looked like a pretty Gollum.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

143. “There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

144. “But in my defense, I knew enough about her to know I wanted to know everything else; I knew as much about her as she wanted me to know; I knew as much about her as anyone ever knows about anyone. And isn’t love just curiosity at the beginning anyway?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

145. “In the future, he will rethink his unlocked-door policy. Though it had occurred to him that something might be stolen, he had never considered the possibility that something might be left.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

146. “I don’t think you can really run away from things. They tend to follow you” -Anya.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

147. “We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

148. “But even a declawed tiger still has teeth... ” -Anya.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

149. “Despite everything that transpired at Unfair Games on December 4th, 2005, and despite evidence to the contrary, it is not an inevitability that we should be our worst selves behind the mask of an avatar.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

150. “A good marriage is, at least, one part conspiracy.”

— Gabrielle Zevin