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

402. “What’s hanafuda?” Sam asked. “Plastic cards. Quite small and thick, with flowers and scenes of nature.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

404. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

426. “In this world, to be overly literal is a profound weakness.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

427. “Sam knew that Sadie knew that he loved her. Sadie knew that Sam loved her in the same way she knew that Sam had not seen the Magic Eye.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

428. “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

429. “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

430. “It would be so easy, Ismay thinks. You walk out. You swim for a while. You swim too far. You don’t try to swim back. Your lungs fill up. It hurts for a bit, but then it’s over. Nothing ever hurts again, and your conscience is clear. You don’t leave a mess. Maybe your body washes up some day. Maybe it doesn’t.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

431. “Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

432. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

438. “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

439. “So, I do want to be rich and famous. I am, as you know, a bottomless pit of ambition and need. But I also want to make something sweet.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

440. “We can never know what else might have happened had other competitors been there. The Russian girls could have won, or they could have gotten jet-lagged and choked.” Anna shrugged. “And this is the truth of any game – it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

441. “We had so much freedom – creatively, technically. No one was watching us, and we weren’t even watching ourselves. What we had was our impossibly high standards, and your completely theoretical conviction that we could make a great game.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

442. “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

443. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

445. “But the best thing Marx did for them was this: He believed in them.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

446. “I love you, Sadie,” Sam said. “I know, Sam. I love you, too.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

448. “I think I don’t like children because I hated being young.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

450. “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