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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

353. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “Ludo means ‘game’ in Latin.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

361. “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

362. “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

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

— 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. “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

366. “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

367. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “He missed Sadie more than he had missed her in the years he hadn’t spoken to her, because there she was, every day. It looked like Sadie and it spoke like Sadie, but somehow it was no longer Sadie.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

387. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

389. “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

390. “You are a gaming person, which is to say you are the kind of person who believes that “game over” is a construction. The game is only over if you stop playing. There is always one more life. Even the most brutal death isn’t final.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

391. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

393. “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

394. “Macbeth has just heard the news that his wife had died, and he is giving the most famous soliloquy from the play, the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

395. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

397. “The good news is that the pain is in your head.” But I am in my head, Sam thought.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

398. “You don’t want to meet someone like you too early in your life, or you won’t ever like anyone else.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

399. “A great textile, like the William Morris Strawberry Thief, is a piece of art, but it takes a lot of time to make a piece of art. It isn’t simply design either. You have to understand the fabrics and what they can bear. You have to understand the dyeing process and how to achieve certain colors and what will make the color last through the ages. If you make a mistake, you might have to begin again.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

400. “Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met – he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know – were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard?”

— Gabrielle Zevin