Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Evey day, there is less of me. Today I am thoughts without words. Tomorrow I will be a body without thoughts. And so it goes.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

153. “He has read enough to know there are no collections where each story is perfect. Some hits. Some misses. If you’re lucky, a standout. And in the end, people only really remember the standouts anyway, and they don’t remember those for very long.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

156. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

158. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

172. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

193. “There’s a strange sort of quiet when you’re dying. It’s as if you’re in a glass room, and the walls keep getting thicker and thicker.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

194. “Intimacy doesn’t have all that much to do with backseats of cars. Real intimacy is brushing your teeth together.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

196. “What is the point of bad dates if not to have amusing anecdotes for your friends?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

197. “He was so handsome. I nearly wanted to swoon. The word swoon had never even popped into my head before I saw him that night, let alone as something that I might do.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

199. “You would think women would want to stick together when there weren’t that many of them, but they never did. It was as if being a woman was a disease that you didn’t wish to catch. As long as you didn’t associate with the other women, you could imply to the majority, the men: I’m not like those other ones.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin