Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “You couldn’t be old and still be wrong about as many things as she’d been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

252. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

254. “Our moment had passed somehow. I was different. He was, too. Without our “madness” to unite us, there wasn’t anything much there. Or maybe too much had happened in too short a time. It’s like when you take a trip with someone you don’t know very well. Sometimes you can get very close very quickly, but then after the trip is over, you realise all that was a false sort of closeness. An intimacy based on the trip more than the travellers, if that makes any sense.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

255. “Anticipating the worst doesn’t provide insurance from the worst happening,” Mimmy says.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

256. “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

257. “To return to the city of one’s birth always felt like retreat.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

258. “But for Marx, the world was like a breakfast at a five-star hotel in an Asian country – the abundance of it was almost overwhelming. Who wouldn’t want a pineapple smoothie, a roast pork bun, an omelet, pickled vegetables, sushi, and a green-tea-flavored croissant? They were all there for the taking and delicious, in their own way.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

259. “The only love she inspires is the canine kind.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

260. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

262. “Despite everything that transpired at Unfair Games on December 4th, 2005, and despite evidence to the contrary, it is not an inevitability that we should be our worst selves behind the mask of an avatar.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

263. “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

264. “I don’t believe in writer’s block.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

265. “If this were a game, he could hit pause. He could restart, say different things, the right ones this time. He could search his inventory for the item that would make Sadie not leave.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

266. “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

267. “He knew what he was experiencing was a basic error in programming, and he wished he could open up his brain and delete the bad code. Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

268. “I have a pain that exists only in my head,” she said, once some of her vitality had been restored. “I have had it my whole life. But when I feel that pain, I am incapacitated by it, and I am certain that I can’t go on.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

269. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

271. “I’m always seeing the world with magic eyes,” he said. “I’m exploding with childish wonder.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

272. “Covers matter. In my experience, a different cover can make you think you’re reading an entirely different book.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

273. “That love is all there is; is all we know of love. It is enough; the freight should be proportioned to the groove.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

274. “What’s Torschlusspanik?” Sam said. “It means ‘gate-shut panic,’” Simon said. “It’s the fear that time is running out and that you’re going to miss an opportunity. Literally, the gate is closing, and you’ll never get in.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

275. “Marx loved college theater. It wasn’t so much being on stage that he loved, but the productions themselves. He loved the intimacy of being in a tight group of people who had come together, miraculously, for a brief period in time, for the purpose of making art. He mourned every time a production was over, and he rejoiced when he was cast in a new one.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

276. “And sometimes, you get an extra life. But you might kill yourself trying to get the extra life, so it’s not always worth it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

277. “Time was mathematically explicable; it was the heart – the part of the brain represented by the heart – that was the mystery.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

278. “She is seventy, and she believes you try new things or you may as well die.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

279. “There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

280. “Most of the time, Sam did not experience himself as disabled, but the cobblestones, the ice, and the glacial pace at which he had to negotiate them suggested otherwise.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

281. “How I will miss the horses.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

282. “It is the same world, she thought, but I am different. Or is it a different world, but I am the same?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

283. “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

284. “Always remember, mine Sadie: life is very long, unless it is not.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

285. “She had resisted returning there because to return to one’s hometown felt like surrender.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

286. “A woman should never please other people at the expense of pleasing herself.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

287. “The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

288. “Sadie had willed herself to be great: art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

289. “They had the rare kind of friendship that allowed for a great deal of privacy within it. One of the reasons they had become such good friends originally was because she had not insisted he tell his sad stories to satisfy her own curiosity. The least he could do was return the favor.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

290. “To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

291. “But jackets are the redheaded stepchildren of book publishing.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

292. “I love that world more, I think, because it is perfectible. Because I have perfected it. The actual world is the random garbage fire it always is. There’s not a goddamn thing I can do about the actual world’s code.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

293. “Winning is accepting that there are some races a person cannot win.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

294. “She dates some – women and men. She has slipped into bisexuality without needing to make a big thing about it. She is seventy, and she believes you try new things or you may as well die.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

296. “A programmer is a diviner of possible outcomes, and a seer of unseen worlds.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

297. “If Marx at twenty-two had a problem, it was that he was attracted to too many things and people.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

298. “What I believe to my very core is that virtual worlds can be better than the actual world. They can be more moral, more just, more progressive, more empathetic, and more accommodating of difference. And if they can be, shouldn’t they be?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

299. “You think how much these books are like life. Except in Choose Your Own Adventure, you can move backward, and you can choose something else if you don’t like how the story turned out, or if you just want to know the other possible outcomes. You would like to do that, but you can’t. Life moves relentlessly forward.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

300. “I knew your mother so well I could play her part. The same with my own mother and my grandmother and my childhood best friend, Euna, who drowned my the lake by her cousin’s house. There are no ghosts, but up here – she gestured towards her head – it’s a haunted house.”

— Gabrielle Zevin