Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “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

352. “Did she ever reply?” Bong Cha narrowed her eyes at Sam, deciding if her grandson was trying to trick her into appearing foolish. “Yes, in my mind, she did. 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 in the lake by her cousin’s house. There are no ghosts, but up here” – she gestured toward her head – “it’s a haunted house.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

354. “Sadie laughed a bit to herself, thinking this was what it was like to play someone else’s game: to have the illusion of choice, without actual choice.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

355. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

357. “Lambiase is recently divorced. He had married his high school sweetheart, so it took him a long time to realize that she was not, in fact, a sweetheart or a very nice person at all.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

358. “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

359. “He had never seen anything die before and so, he could not be certain that she was dying. And yet, somewhere deep inside himself, he felt a recognition and then a reckoning: this was death, and he would die, and his mother would die, and everyone you ever met and ever loved would die, and maybe it would happen when you or they were old, but maybe not. To know this was unbearable: it was a fact too large for a nine-year-old avatar to contain.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

360. “They had become instant best friends in the way people can in their twenties.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

361. “Ludo means ‘game’ in Latin.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

362. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

364. “While Sadie experienced this period of indecision as stressful, Sam didn’t feel that way at all. The best part of this moment, he thought, is that everything is still possible.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

365. “It’s more than romantic. It’s better than romance It’s friendship.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

367. “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

368. “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

369. “He would know her handwriting anywhere.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

370. “Like Sam, I once lived in a house up a hill from the Happy Foot Sad Foot sign. The Happy Foot Sad Foot sign was taken down in 2019, but I am told you can still find its remains in a gift shop somewhere in Silver Lake.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

371. “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

372. “How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

373. “Visto che siamo al mondo, stiamo tutti morendo.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

374. “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

375. “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

376. “Shinto tradition, a gate represented passing from the mundane to the sacred.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

377. “She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one pace and were entering another.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

378. “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

379. “Friendship,” Marx said, “is kind of like having a Tamagotchi.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

380. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

382. “Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, by David Kushner;.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

383. “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.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

384. “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

385. “It’s just an absence seizure. I used to have them a lot as a kid. I rarely have them as an adult except when I’m unusually stressed.” “You should see a doctor.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

386. “Love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

387. “What I think you should consider,” Alabaster said, “is the rarity of finding a playmate in either this world or the other world.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

388. “She knew that the presence of the timesheet made it seem as if she had an ulterior motive, though the truth was obvious to her: Sadie Green liked being praised, and Sam Masur was the best friend she had ever had.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

389. “If their traumas are the most interesting things about them, how do they get over any of it?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

390. “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

391. “The key to being a good thief, Sam always felt, was utter brazenness.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

392. “But the reason she was bourgeois was so she could make work that wasn’t bourgeois. If she were cautious in her life, she could avoid compromising in her work.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

394. “As Sam often said to Sadie, “Why make anything if you don’t believe it could be great?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

395. “Alice would only have to be in the hospital for two nights this time, and it was only out of, according to her mother, “an abundance of caution.” It reminded her of a murder of crows, a flock of seagulls, a pack of wolves. She imagined that “caution” was a creature of some kind – maybe, a cross between a Saint Bernard and an elephant. A large, intelligent, friendly animal that could be counted on to defend the Green sisters from threats, existential and otherwise.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

396. “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 one you were living.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

397. “Puedes tomar prestadas las palabras que no encuentras.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

398. “A name is destiny, if you think it is.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

399. “From the window, she could see the water tower of the New England Confectionery Company’s factory, which had recently been painted to resemble a roll of Necco wafers, those barely flavored, pastel-colored, vaguely religious-looking chalky disks. As they approached the factory, the air increasingly smelled of sugar, and the scent made Sadie nostalgic for a candy she had never even tasted.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

400. “Alice was clever, but she had the kind of cleverness that verged on the unkind, and this had only gotten worse in the years since she had been diagnosed with leukemia. Sadie didn’t want Sam viewed through her sister’s acute and often unforgiving lens.”

— Gabrielle Zevin