Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

303. “You wouldn’t be abandoning me if you stopped to get a Band-Aid, you know.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

304. “She could feel herself forgetting all the details of Marx – the sound of his voice, the feeling of his fingers and the way they gestured, his precise temperature, his scent on clothing, the way he looked walking away, or running up a flight of stairs. Eventually, Sadie imagined that Marx would be reduced to a single image: just a man standing under a torii gate, holding his hat in his hands, waiting for her.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

305. “Amelia’s mother had died two years ago, and though their relationship had been challenging at times, she misses her with an unexpected ferocity. For instance, until her death, her mother had sent her new underwear in the mail every other month. Amelia had not once had to buy underwear her whole life. Recently, she had found herself standing in the lingerie department at TJ Maxx, and as she went through the panty bin, she had begun to cry: No one will ever love me that much again.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

306. “And as much as a person might try to shield herself from it, the possibility for the other outcome was always there. We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

307. “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

308. “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

309. “What suit jacket would say “supportive,” “feminist,” “unbroken,” “optimistic”? What one effing suit jacket could possibly accomplish that?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

311. “In life, Jane reflected, the most interesting things tend to happen when you’re on your way to do something else.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

317. “We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

321. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

323. “Emily B. Marks.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

324. “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

325. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

328. “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

329. “I felt guilty, but lighter. I had turned my problem into someone else’s.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

333. “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

334. “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

335. “Sadie and Marx took a cab back to the hotel. “Do you mind what your father said?” she asked him. “No,” Marx said. “I loved being a student actor. I was fully devoted to it, and now I’m not. I think if I’d become a professional, I would likely have fallen out of love with it anyway. It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

338. “You know very well that I was in Germany as a child, and you have heard the stories, so I won’t tell them to you again. But I can tell you that the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.” “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Sadie said. Freda stroked Sadie’s hand. “Mine Sadie. This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”

— 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. “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

341. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

343. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

346. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

349. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin