Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “He kissed me, though not in a sexy way. Gentle. Tender.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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210. “A bromide about the creative process is that an artist’s first idea is usually the best one.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

211. “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

212. “It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us, but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

213. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

221. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

223. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

227. “She was intelligent, but her intelligence didn’t get in her way of her enthusiasm.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

233. “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

234. “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

235. “So, I do want to be rich and famous. I am, as you know, a bottomless pit of ambition and need. But I also want to make something sweet. Something kids like us would have wanted to play to forget their troubles for a while.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

237. “As he said to Sam, “If I’ve done the work in the scenes before I die, if I’ve made a real impression, they’ll feel me in the scenes I’m not in anyway.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

249. “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

250. “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