Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

303. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

332. “Ludo means ‘game’ in Latin.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

333. “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

334. “To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back – I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

335. “Emily B. Marks.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

338. “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

339. “Sometimes, I would be in so much pain. The only thing that kept me from wanting to die was the fact that I could leave my body and be in a body that worked perfectly for a while – better than perfectly, actually – with a set of problems that were not my own.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

341. “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

342. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

344. “No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

348. “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

349. “Complete waste,” she said. “Sorry, Sam. The universe tortured you because it could, because it will. The enormous polyhedral die in the sky was rolled, and it came up ‘Torture Sam Masur.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

350. “He wanted Ichigo’s life, a lifetime of endless, immaculate tomorrows, free of mistakes and the evidence of having lived.”

— Gabrielle Zevin