Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

302. “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

303. “To know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

304. “Your cousin Albert told me that, in business, they call this a pivot. But life is filled with them, too. The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

305. “The game character, like the self, is contextual.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

309. “What I think you should consider... is the rarity of finding a playmate.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

310. “Sam and his mother, Anna Lee, arrived in Los Angeles in July of 1984. It was the summer of the Olympics, the first Summer Olympics to be held in the United States in fifty years. The mood was hopeful and manic.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

311. “Friendship is friendship, and charity is charity... the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “She drew the curtains, and she got into bed, without taking off her clothes or her shoes. She felt ashamed and foolish. She felt covered in failure and she felt sure that people could smell and see it on her. The failure was like a fine coating of ash, after a fire. But it wasn’t only on her skin; it was in her nose, in her mouth, in her lungs, in her molecules becoming part of her. She would never be rid of it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

320. “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

321. “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

322. “In games, the thing that matters most is the order of things. The game has an algorithm, but the player also must create a play algorithm in order to win. There is an order to any victory. There is an optimal way to play any game.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

323. “The world had always looked painfully beautiful to him when he was sick. It was only when he was alone and he couldn’t participate in the business of living that he tended to notice how lovely being alive was.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

324. “I’ve decided we’re going to be great friends, by the way. Don’t bother trying to resist me. I’ll stalk you until you submit.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

326. “Emily B. Marks.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

327. “If something is good and universally acknowledged to be so, this is not reason enough to dislike it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

330. “But people – the ordinary, the decent and basically honest – couldn’t get through the day without that one indispensable bit of programming that allowed you to say one thing and mean, feel, even do, another.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

331. “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

332. “What a funny turn of phrase, she thought. Licking your wounds would only make them worse, no? The mouth was filled with so much bacteria. But Sadie knew it was easy to get addicted to the taste of your own carnage.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

333. “He missed Sadie more than he had missed her in the years he hadn’t spoken to her, because there she was, every day. It looked like Sadie and it spoke like Sadie, but somehow it was no longer Sadie.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

334. “At a certain age – in Sadie’s case, thirty-four – there comes a time when life largely consists of having meals with old friends who are passing through town.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

335. “He had begun to suspect that while he had an obvious aptitude for math, he was not particularly inspired by it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

337. “To be alive was to accept that your were fundamentally alone.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

338. “A maze,” he would say, “is a video game distilled to its purest form.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

339. “To make a game is to imagine the person playing it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

340. “A good game, like Ichigo, was hard, but fair. The “unfair game” was life itself.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

341. “The coyotes felt capable, canny, and strangely anthropomorphized, as if they had been endowed with human features by a team of animators. Their hair seemed artfully disheveled, the haircut of a hot, young actor playing a drug addict in an independent film. The coyotes felt more human than most of the humans Sam encountered, more human than Sam himself felt back then.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

342. “On the day she found Daedalus blowing the glass heart, she had suspected Sam, but she had also allowed herself not to know. She wanted to play more than she wanted to know. Sadie told Sam he had tricked her, but the truth was, she had tricked herself. It was embarrassing how much that silly, exquisite world had meant to her. A year and a half later, she.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

343. “Video games don’t make people violent, but maybe they falsely give you the idea that you can be a hero.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

344. “Sadie felt a swelling love and of worry for him – what was the difference in the end? It was never worth worrying about someone you didn’t love. And it wasn’t love if you didn’t worry.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

345. “Other people’s parents are often a delight.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

346. “We walk back to town, and he looks at me seriously and he says, ‘Sadie, when you tell this story, say I asked you at the glass flower exhibit. Don’t say it was closed.’ The myth, the narrative, whatever you want to call it, was always of supreme importance to Sam.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

347. “I’m going to play until the end of this life.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

348. “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

349. “You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it’s a perfect time for you to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin