Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Every word the right one and exactly where it should be. That’s basically the highest compliment I can give.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

209. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

211. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

214. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

219. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

236. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

240. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

243. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

245. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

248. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

250. “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