Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “What, after all, is a video game’s subtextual preoccupation if not the erasure of mortality?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

154. “If you’re always aiming for perfection, you won’t make anything at all.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

155. “But I can tell you that the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

163. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

165. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— 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. “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

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

176. “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

177. “Why was it acceptable for apparently well-meaning people to see the world in such a general way?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

178. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

188. “It was never worth worrying about someone you didn’t love. And it wasn’t love if you didn’t worry.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

189. “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

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. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

197. “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

198. “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

199. “An “online presence” is “all the true things and all the lies about a person on the Internet.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

200. “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