Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

205. “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

206. “It is a lie that people who love each other must know everything about each other. Love must occasionally allow for a gap.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

207. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

212. “When Sam had described the relationship between Marx and his father, he had said it was fraught, that Watanabe-san was demanding and sometimes even demeaning to Marx. Sadie saw no evidence of that. She found Marx’s father to be bright, interesting, and engaged. Other people’s parents are often a delight.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

213. “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

214. “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

215. “Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

216. “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

217. “Throughout his life, Sam had hated being told to ‘fight,’ as if sickness were a character failing. Illness could not be defeated, no matter how hard you fought, and pain, once it had you in its grasp, was transformational.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

218. “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

219. “This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

221. “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

222. “Friendship is friendship, and charity is charity... the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

223. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

225. “On the ferry from Hyannis to Alice Island, Amelia Loman paints her nails.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

230. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

235. “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

236. “How quickly you go from being the youngest to the oldest person in a room, she thought.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

237. “The problem with meeting new people is not that you might not like them, but that you will like them too much.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

238. “My point is, it’s tempting,” she said. “It is certainly tempting to continue on with something because it has already begun.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

242. “The store is fifteen Mayas wide and twenty Mayas long. She knows this because she once spent an afternoon measuring it by lying her body across the room. It is fortunate that it is not more than thirty Mayas long because that is as far as she could count on the day the measurements were taken.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

243. “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

244. “Daddy always said you only explained things to the people that actually mattered.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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247. “I am the proud owner of several complexes. But who isn’t? When you think about it, isn’t a person just a structure built in reaction to the landscape and the weather?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

248. “He was like a bright, warm light over everything in her life. She felt lit up, turned on. There was no one better to talk to about games. Yes, she loved him, but she also liked him. She liked herself when she was with him.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

249. “Well, for one, you have to remember not to scream. Once you have their attention, whispering is much more effective. Screaming ghosts scare people, you know.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

250. “How I will miss the horses.”

— Gabrielle Zevin