Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “There must be more to life than working and swimming and playing Go.” “The boredom you speak of,” Alabaster said. “It is what most of us call happiness.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

302. “Sammy, we were together. You must know that. When I’m honest with myself, the most important parts of me were yours.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

303. “Beauty, after all, is almost always a matter of angles and resolve. Urban renewal projects were accomplished so frantically it seemed like time-lapse photography.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

308. “The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets. You may not ever have a romantic relationship with Sadie, but you two will be friends for the rest of your lives, and that is something of equal or greater value, if you choose to see it that way.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

310. “Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

311. “And in the end, she had decided she preferred being his creative partner to being his lover. 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

312. “How do I go on when the person I love most in the world is in love with someone else? Someone tell me the solution, he thought, so I don’t have to play this losing game all the way through.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

313. “Promise me you’ll always forgive me, and I promise I’ll always forgive you.” These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

314. “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

315. “And this is the truth of any game – it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

316. “I have found that the most intimate relationships allow for a great deal of privacy within them.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

317. “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

318. “Sam was her friend, but “friend” was a broad category, wasn’t it? “Friend” was a word that was overused to the point that it had no meaning at all.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

321. “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

322. “Zweisamkeit’ is the feeling of being alone even when you’re with other people.” Simon turned to.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

323. “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a novel about work, and I would be remiss if I did not thank my colleagues, whose ideas, skills, questions, observations, provocations, encouragements, witticisms, letters, phone calls, Zooms, texts, PowerPoint presentations, and occasional course corrections have improved this book enormously.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

324. “Maya, we are what we love. We are that we love.” Maya is shaking her head. “Dad, I’m sorry. I don’t understand.” “We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

325. “Emily B. Marks.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

326. “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.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

327. “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

328. “But this was classic Sam – he had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

329. “Let her know you’re there. And if you can manage it, bring her a cookie, a book, a movie to watch. Friendship,” Marx said, “is kind of like having a Tamagotchi.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

330. “What is a storm? Sadie thought. It is water, and it is light, and it is wind. And it is how these three elements act on the surfaces they touch. How hard can that be?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

331. “How much of your life had been happenstance? How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky? But then, weren’t all lives that way? Who could say, in the end, that they had chosen any of it?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

334. “Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you love someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

335. “Beauty, after all, is almost always a matter of angles and resolve.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

336. “Ludo means ‘game’ in Latin.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

337. “All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture, by Harold Goldberg;.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

338. “But Sadie knew it was easy to get addicted to the taste of your own carnage.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

339. “It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

340. “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

341. “I love you,” Daedalus said. “It is hard for me to say, because sometimes it doesn’t seem like it is enough.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

342. “While Keanu sat in the chair, Audrey lay in the bed next to Tiny Tim, their fingertips casually touching, in the way of people who were entirely comfortable around each other. She almost seemed to be an extension of him, and he, of her. There is love here, she thought.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

343. “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

344. “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

345. “About a week before the winter break – they were still young enough to understand time in semesters.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

346. “You aren’t just a gamer when you play anymore. You’re a builder of worlds, and if you’re a builder of worlds, your feelings are not as important as what your gamers are feeling. You must imagine them at all times. There is no artist more empathetic than the game designer.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

347. “There are, he determines, infinite ways his mother doesn’t die that night and only one way she does.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

348. “Maybe this is selfish, but I don’t want to love more than I am loved. And I don’t want to be with someone who loves something or someone more than me.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

349. “Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

350. “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