Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

404. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

406. “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

407. “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

408. “Why was it so hard for him to say he loved her even when she said it to him? He knew he loved her. People who felt far less for each other said “love” all the time, and it didn’t mean a thing. And maybe that was the point. He more than loved Sadie Green. There needed to be another word for it.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “Click on this word, he thought, and you will find links to everything it means. Because you are my oldest friend. Because once, when I was at my lowest, you saved me. Because I might have died without you or ended up in a children’s psychiatric hospital. Because I owe you. Because, selfishly, I see a future where we make fantastic games together, if you can manage to get out of bed.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

413. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

421. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

423. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

425. “This is the most violent poetry game I’ve ever played,′ Marx said.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

426. “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

427. “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

428. “But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

429. “You try again. You fail better.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

430. “The lines mean that one doesn’t have to be a god or a king for your life to have meaning.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

432. “I’ve been blue, lately,” Sam admitted. “And I wondered, how do you get over that sort of thing?” “Work helps,” Sadie said. “Games help. But sometimes, when I’m really low, I keep a particular image in my mind.” “What is it?” “I imagine people playing. Sometimes, it’s one of our games, but sometimes, it’s any game. 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

433. “The words you can’t find, you borrow. We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

436. “But sometimes, you have to make your game in the time that you have. If you’re always aiming for perfection, you won’t make anything at all.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

439. “I imagine people playing. Sometimes, it’s one of our games, but sometimes, it’s any game. 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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “Sadie hadn’t worked on a game of her own since she’d been with Dov, though she did occasionally help him with his. It was easier, in some ways, to work with and for Dov than it was to do her own work.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

444. “He would know her handwriting anywhere.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

446. “No, this is a great game. That’s Cobainus. The eleven stars of Cobainus form a fuzzy grandma sweater,” Marx said.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

447. “Never use someone else’s engine, if you can help it,” Dov warned. “You cede too much power to them.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

448. “It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she had arrived. But life was always arriving.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

450. “She liked going to bed early and waking up early. She liked working. She liked that she was good at her work, and she felt proud of the fact that she was well paid for it. She felt pleasure in orderly things – a perfectly efficient section of code, a closet where every item was in its place. She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable.”

— Gabrielle Zevin