Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Maya, we are what we love. We are that we love.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “Maybe if I’d been braver in that moment, I would have cried.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

160. “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

161. “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.” Simon’s.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

162. “Violence should not always beget more violence.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

163. “Living, it seemed to her, was the acquiring of bad habits. Dying, the process of rescinding them.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

166. “You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They’re the last to go. And then once you’ve forgotten enough, you love someone else.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

167. “It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

168. “I thought I was grown-up. I thought I knew what I was doing. These were a few of the lies I told myself.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

169. “Hi,” Sam said, without looking at her. “You can watch if you want. I’m going to play until the end of this life.” “That’s a good philosophy,” Anna said. She concentrated on the game and tried not to hear the nearby sirens.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

170. “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

171. “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

172. “I believe when it is convenient for me to believe.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

173. “They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

175. “People like what they like, and that’s the great and terrible thing.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

176. “Novels certainly have their charms, but the most elegant creation in the prose universe is a short story.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

177. “I want this job.” “Many people do, my girl.” “How do I get it?” Maya asks. “Reading, as aforementioned.” Maya nods. “I do that.” “A good chair.” “I have one of those.” “Then you’re well on your way,” Daniel tells her before setting her back on the ground. “I’ll.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

178. “And I was crying for gravity. It had sent me down the stairs, and I’d thought that meant something, but maybe it was just the direction that all things tend to flow.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

179. “Why are you so quiet?” he asks. Because, you want to say, I am a person with an interior world that you know nothing about.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

180. “Friendship,” Marx said, “is kind of like having a Tamagotchi.” Tamagotchis, the digital pet keychains, were everywhere that year.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

181. “That Woman is in love with her own grief.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

182. “The way he saw it, he would be proposing to Sadie. He would be getting down on one knee and saying, “Will you work with me? Will you give me your time, and will you trust my hunch that this time will be well spent? Will you believe that we could make great things together?” For all his natural arrogance, he did not assume that she would say yes.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

183. “Dancing was a kind of surrender to feeling, to sound, to the present” -Anya.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

184. “She was intelligent, but her intelligence didn’t get in her way of her enthusiasm.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

185. “Each period had required me to be a slightly different person, and that was exhausting. I wondered if school had always felt this way and whether it was like this for everone.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

186. “It is lucky, she thinks, that we don’t feel all the love inside us every moment. We couldn’t breathe or walk or eat. It is lucky that it just flares up every now and again then resolves itself into a manageable dormancy.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

187. “But you, you can never do anything hard. And I let you be that way.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

188. “My beautiful Win. I wanted to kiss him on every last broken place, but his mother and my lawyer were there. So, instead I started to cry.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

189. “Last year, that Fischer idiot threw a black-and-white cookie at me, and I started to wonder if every principal exited this school with a ceremonial baked good fling.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

190. “It is a well-known fact that hate shows up on your face once you’re forty.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

191. “But then again, maybe ‘I will’ is nicer. It has the future in it. ‘I do’ just has the present.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

192. “A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Koreatown, Los Angeles. And as any mixed race person will tell you – to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

193. “When you think about it, isn’t a person just a structure built in reaction to the landscape and the weather?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

194. “But me-also-thinks my latter-day reaction speaks to the necessity of encountering stories at precisely the right time in our lives.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

195. “He put his head in the crook of her shoulder; the freight was in proportion to the groove.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

196. “I don’t think I would have minded you being the keeper of my secrets.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

197. “A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

198. “Her mother likes to say that novels have ruined Amelia for real men.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

199. “He kissed me, though not in a sexy way. Gentle. Tender.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

200. “We had been there about four days when she said, “It feels like last year was a dream,” she said. “It feels like I had a fever, and the fever has finally broken.” “I’m glad,” I said. “Still,” she said, “sometimes I miss the fever.”

— Gabrielle Zevin