Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The casualities seemed to go on and on. Just when I thought I was done losing her, I would find yet another way to love her all over again.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

202. “The words of Anders Larsson came back to him: “To be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

203. “I longed for Mum in the most primitive way.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

205. “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

206. “But the best parts of him were in his books. I suppose I could always read those if I missed him too much. I haven’t wanted to read one yet, though.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

208. “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

209. “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

210. “I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

211. “I do believe that food lobbies exert enormous, at times insidious, power over what we eat, that our water supplies are not being protected as much as they probably should be and that, in general, people are more interested in smart phones than museums.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

212. “Just because something is a small problem doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be addressed. Small injustices conceal larger ones” -Anya.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

213. “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

214. “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

215. “Janine smiles. “Strike the second sentence. Reader will know. Show, don’t tell.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

216. “It is lucky, she thinks, that we don’t feel all the love inside us every moment.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

217. “Embeth looked at the return address. It was from her most faithful friend, Shipment Fulfillment Center.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

218. “I thought of summer as the living time; the rest of the year was the backward time, the writing time.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

222. “I do not know much about boys, but I think superior research skills would be a Very Good Thing to have in a boyfriend.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

223. “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

224. “But jackets are the redheaded stepchildren of book publishing. We blame them for everything.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

225. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

227. “If this were a novel, I’d stop reading right now. I’d throw it across the room.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

228. “The boredom you speak of, it is what most of us call happiness.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

230. “His mistake had been in thinking the world would be filled with Sadie Greens, people like her. It was not.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

231. “In life, Jane reflected, the most interesting things tend to happen when you’re on your way to do something else.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

232. “But it is worth noting that to be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

233. “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

234. “Amelia’s mother had died two years ago, and though their relationship had been challenging at times, she misses her with an unexpected ferocity. For instance, until her death, her mother had sent her new underwear in the mail every other month. Amelia had not once had to buy underwear her whole life. Recently, she had found herself standing in the lingerie department at TJ Maxx, and as she went through the panty bin, she had begun to cry: No one will ever love me that much again.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

235. “What suit jacket would say “supportive,” “feminist,” “unbroken,” “optimistic”? What one effing suit jacket could possibly accomplish that?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

236. “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

237. “You wouldn’t be abandoning me if you stopped to get a Band-Aid, you know.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

240. “She could feel herself forgetting all the details of Marx – the sound of his voice, the feeling of his fingers and the way they gestured, his precise temperature, his scent on clothing, the way he looked walking away, or running up a flight of stairs. Eventually, Sadie imagined that Marx would be reduced to a single image: just a man standing under a torii gate, holding his hat in his hands, waiting for her.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

241. “This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

242. “Oh yes, it’s very tragic. Why does everyone always like love stories? What about absence-of-love stories? Aren’t they much more common?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

243. “I felt guilty, but lighter. I had turned my problem into someone else’s.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

244. “A good game designer knows that clinging to a few early ideas about a project can cut off the potential for the work.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

245. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

246. “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

247. “They didn’t put a scarlet letter on her chest, but they didn’t need to. That’s what the Internet is for.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

248. “Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans. Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

249. “To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

250. “It is time for you to set your house in order.”

— Gabrielle Zevin