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

— Gabrielle Zevin

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “I thought you were worried I was going to die,” Sam said. “No. You’ll never die. And if you ever died, I’d just start the game again,” Sadie said. “Sam’s dead. Put another quarter in the machine.” “Go back to the save point. Keep playing, and we’ll win eventually.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

361. “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

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. “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

364. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

366. “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

367. “There are people like you and like me. We have bad things happen to us, and we survive them. We are sturdy. But with people like your friend, you must be exceptionally gentle, or they may break.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

378. “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

379. “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

380. “Die Liebe ist Konstante und Variable zugleich.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

381. “The detail of Macbeth throwing dinner rolls at Banquo’s empty chair comes from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2018 production of Macbeth, directed by Polly Findlay and starring Christopher Eccleston in the title role.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

382. “They were at that rare moment in a collaboration where they were consistently grokking, where consensus was reached quickly on almost everything.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

384. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

386. “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

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

— 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. “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

391. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

393. “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

394. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

396. “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

397. “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, by Jason Schreier;.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

398. “The thing I find profoundly hopeful when I’m feeling despair is to imagine people playing, to believe that no matter how bad the world gets, there will always be players.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

399. “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

400. “If Marx at twenty-two had a problem, it was that he was attracted to too many things and people.”

— Gabrielle Zevin