Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

208. “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

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

— 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. “Hi,” Sam said, without looking at her. “You can watch if you want. I’m going to play until the end of this life.” “That’s a good philosophy,” Anna said. She concentrated on the game and tried not to hear the nearby sirens.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

216. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

223. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

225. “There were so many people who could be your lover, but, if she was honest with herself, there were relatively few people who could move you creatively.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

227. “A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

234. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

241. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

247. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin