Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

357. “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

358. “Beneath Sadie’s eyes were barely perceptible crescents, but then, she’d had these as a kid too. Still, he felt she seemed tired. Sam looked at Sadie, and he thought, 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

359. “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

360. “It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us,” the passage goes, “but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down a road. And someday, you do not know when, he, or indeed she, will be there. You will be loved because for the first time in your life, you will truly not be alone. You will have chosen to not be alone.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

362. “Long relationships might be richer, but relatively brief, relatively uncomplicated encounters with interesting people could be lovely as well. Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

366. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

368. “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

369. “Los Angeles, especially when taken from a distance, was not a beautiful city, but she could will herself to be beautiful, if only for two weeks. Beauty, after all, is almost always a matter of angles and resolve.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

371. “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. We are not quite novels. The analogy he is looking for is almost there. We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that. In the end, we are collected works.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

372. “He was no longer the boy who wanted to taste everything at the buffet, and he considered it a sign of his own maturity that he had not thought to end things with Zoe. But his disdain for his former itinerancy had made it so he could not recognize the reasons a person should stay.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

373. “This fabric is not just a fabric. It’s the story of failure and of perseverance, of the discipline of a craftsman, of the life of an artist.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

374. “The universe, he felt, was just – or if not just, fair enough.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

375. “I forget how young you are. You’re still at the age where you mistake your friends and your colleagues for family.” “Yes, Dov,” she said, trying to hide her irritation. “When you have children, you’ll never be able to worry about a friend as much again,” Dov said.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

376. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

379. “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

380. “We must fill our infinite days with something.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

381. “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

382. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

384. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

386. “Tell me I don’t know you, Sam thought. Tell me I don’t know you when I could draw both sides of this hand, your hand, from memory.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

388. “And in those days, girls like Sadie were conditioned to ignore the sexist generally, not just in gaming – it wasn’t cool to point such things out. If you wanted to play with the boys, they couldn’t be afraid of saying things around you.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

391. “A good man is hard to find,” she says finally. “Do you mean the O’Connor story? The one on your desk. It’s an awfully dark thing to bring up at a time like this.” “No, I mean you. I’ve been looking forever. It was only two trains and a boat away.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

392. “Marx’s life had been filled with such abundance that he was one of those people who found it natural to care for those around him.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

393. “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

394. “Leemos para saber que no estamos solos. Leemos porque estamos solos. Leemos y no estamos solos. No estamos solos.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

395. “Computers are great for experimentation, but they’re bad for deep thinking.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

396. “Sometimes, though, I get tired of learning lessons.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

397. “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

398. “We are not quite novels. The analogy he is looking for is almost there. We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that. In the end, we are collected works. He has read enough to know there are no collections where each story is perfect. Some hits. Some misses. If you’re lucky, a standout. And in the end, people only really remember the standouts anyway, and they don’t remember those for very long.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

399. “So many of the mothers she knew said that their children were exactly themselves from the moment they appeared in the world. But Sadie disagreed. What person was a person without language? Tastes? Preferences? Experiences? And on the other side of childhood, what grown-up wanted to believe that they had emerged from their parents fully formed? Sadie knew that she herself had not become a person until recently. It was unreasonable to expect a child to emerge whole cloth.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

400. “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