Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

162. “Bookstores attract the right kind of folk.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

163. “Turns out I really like bookstores. You know, I meet a lot of people in my line of work. A lot of folks pass through Alice Island, especially in the summer. I’ve seen movie people on vacation and I’ve seen music people and newspeople, too. There ain’t nobody in the world like book people. It’s a business of gentlemen and gentlewoman.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

165. “He doesn’t believe in “the one.” There are zillions of people in the world; no one is that special.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

166. “When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

167. “I knew near everything about him, and he knew near everything about me, and all that made our quite a kind of song.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

168. “Daddy once said, “If you don’t know what you believe, Annie, you’ll be a lost soul.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

169. “Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

170. “Babies move more than books and aren’t as conveniently shaped.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

171. “I do not believe in God. I have no religion. But this to me is as close to a church as I have known in this life. It is a holy place. With bookstores like this, I feel confident in saying that there will be a book business for a very long time.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

172. “From Nic’s point of view, her older sister had been a primer on how not to live her life.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

173. “In truth, she hadn’t put much thought into whether she was happy before. She supposes that since she never thought about it, she must have been happy. People who are happy don’t really need to ask themselves if they are happy or not, do they? They just are happy, she thinks.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

174. “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

175. “It’s sad when you think about it, but also kind of beautiful.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

176. “In reading Twain, I often suspect he is having more fun than I am.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

177. “It was odd to have something so personal out there in that way, but the good thing about art is that no one necessarily knows what you mean by it anyway.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

179. “When I was in my twenties and broke, I’d buy books before food. A meal will sustain you for a few hours, a good book will sustain you for life.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “Every word the right one and exactly where it should be. That’s basically the highest compliment I can give.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

184. “On Earth, Liz was constantly occupied with studying and finding a college and a career and all those other things that the adults in her life deemed terribly important. Since she had died, everything she was doing on Earth had seemed entirely meaningless. From Liz’s point of view, the question of what her life would be was now definitively answered. The story of her life is short and pointless: There once was a girl who got hit by a car and died. The end.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

185. “She could remember the sensation of flying through the air, which seemed to last an eternity. She could remember feeling reckless, happy, and doomed, all at the same time. She could remember thinking, I am above gravity.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

186. “My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

187. “If you’re honest with yourself, one of the reasons you moved into an off-campus apartment and didn’t get any roommates is because you hoped something like this would happen. You set the stage, and you knew the player wouldn’t be able to resist the call of the theater.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

188. “I like all weddings, but isn’t it particularly lovely when two grown-ups decide to get married?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

189. “If Jenny were a book, she would be a paperback just out of the box – no dog ears, no waterlogging, no creases in her spine.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

190. “Imagine getting to be one of those people who actually gets paid to talk about literature.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

191. “The first way Maya approaches a book is to smell it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

193. “Remember that a fine education can be found in places other than the usual.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

195. “There ain’t nobody in the world like book people. It’s a business of gentlemen and gentlewomen.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

196. “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

197. “But then again maybe “I will” is nicer. It has a future in it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

198. “Maya has chosen to be ring bearer because the job has more responsibility than flower girl. “If you lose a flower, you get another flower,” Maya reasons. “If you lose the ring, everyone is sad forever.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

199. “It’s when you don’t need something that you tend to lose it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

200. “I met a travler from an ancient land.”

— Gabrielle Zevin