Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

352. “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

353. “You think how much these books are like life. Except in Choose Your Own Adventure, you can move backward, and you can choose something else if you don’t like how the story turned out, or if you just want to know the other possible outcomes. You would like to do that, but you can’t. Life moves relentlessly forward.”

— 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.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

355. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

370. “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

371. “Maya, we are what we love. We are that we love.” Maya is shaking her head. “Dad, I’m sorry. I don’t understand.” “We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

380. “They say success kills relationships, but the lack of it will do it just as quickly.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

381. “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

382. “For Ms. Pac-Man, Anna thought, life was cheap and filled with second chances.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

383. “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

384. “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

385. “The coyotes felt capable, canny, and strangely anthropomorphized, as if they had been endowed with human features by a team of animators. Their hair seemed artfully disheveled, the haircut of a hot, young actor playing a drug addict in an independent film. The coyotes felt more human than most of the humans Sam encountered, more human than Sam himself felt back then.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

387. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

389. “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

390. “On the day she found Daedalus blowing the glass heart, she had suspected Sam, but she had also allowed herself not to know. She wanted to play more than she wanted to know. Sadie told Sam he had tricked her, but the truth was, she had tricked herself. It was embarrassing how much that silly, exquisite world had meant to her. A year and a half later, she.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

391. “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

392. “When you have children, you’ll never be able to worry about a friend as much again,” Dov said.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

394. “But this was classic Sam – he had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

395. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

397. “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

398. “What was amazing to Sam – and what became a theme of the games he would go on to make with Sadie – was how quickly the world could shift. How your sense of self could change depending on your location. As Sadie would put it in an interview with.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

399. “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

400. “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