Top 500 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “No, this is a great game. That’s Cobainus. The eleven stars of Cobainus form a fuzzy grandma sweater,” Marx said.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

402. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

404. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

406. “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

407. “On the third day, he brought a library copy of the novel Galatea 2.2, which he had recently enjoyed.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

408. “Sam was leaning on his good foot, in the increasingly lopsided way he had to stand, and Sadie felt a swelling of 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

409. “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

410. “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a novel about work, and I would be remiss if I did not thank my colleagues, whose ideas, skills, questions, observations, provocations, encouragements, witticisms, letters, phone calls, Zooms, texts, PowerPoint presentations, and occasional course corrections have improved this book enormously.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

411. “We had both heard worse. People were often the worst versions of themselves in the months leading up to a wedding. Occasionally, though, the worst version of someone was the actual version of someone, but it was difficult to know if one was in that situation until after the fact.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

412. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

414. “The greatest pleasures of his life had been when he was by her side, playing or inventing. And how could she not feel that as well? There would never be another Sadie, and now this one was lost to him.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

415. “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

416. “I forget how young you are. You’re still at the age where you mistake your friends and your colleagues for family.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

417. “There would be leaves in the fall, and snow in the winter, and cherry blossoms in the spring. 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

418. “It’s like Oz and Kansas, if Dorothy could switch between them the whole time.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

419. “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.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

421. “I love you,” Daedalus said. “It is hard for me to say, because sometimes it doesn’t seem like it is enough.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

423. “There is no purity in art. The process of how you arrive at something doesn’t matter at all.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

424. “Sadie might be the kind of book that one could read many times, and always come away with something new.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

425. “The child’s body moves the way a body can move before it has felt or even encountered the idea of pain.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

426. “There is a pleasure to the joining of property as well, otherwise why would we all keep doing it? ‘Pleasure’ might be too strong a word. If not a pleasure, let us say an interest. It develops the plot.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

427. “No doubt, you are doomed to love again.” “Doomed? That’s an awful thing to say.” “Doomed, blessed. It’s only your perspective.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

428. “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

429. “Yes, she loved him, but she also liked him. She liked herself when she was with him.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

430. “There were smart people, yes. There were people with whom you might have a decent conversation for twenty minutes. But to find someone who you wanted to talk to for 609 hours – that was rare. Even Marx – Marx was devoted, creative, and bright, but he was not Sadie.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

432. “Sometimes I feel like the wedding is a Trojan horse. The dream I peddle to distract from the reality of a marriage. They choose these things to distinguish themselves from everyone else. They choose these things to make themselves feel less ordinary. But is there anything more ordinary than choosing to get married?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

433. “Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

434. “If it doesn’t work, all we’ve lost is a lot of time and money.” Sam laughed. “Let’s do this,” he said.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

436. “Lambiase and the first Ms. Fikry speak variations on the phrase, “A town isn’t a town without a bookstore.” Surely, they both must have read American Gods by Neil Gaiman.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

437. “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

438. “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

439. “I fail in my work every day, but I keep turning over the problems until I’m not failing anymore. But public failures are different, it’s true.” “So, what do I do?” she asked. “You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it’s a perfect time for you to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

440. “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.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

442. “But then he reminded himself: They are not only my friends. They are my colleagues. He had turned them into his colleagues, and in a strange way, that was comforting to Sam. Ichigo bonded them to him for life.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

443. “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

444. “The Fall of the House of Usher’ is a fair primer on what not to do with children.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

445. “Or, I’m sorry, is Ichigo a him?” “Sam and Sadie say them.” “Cool. When the parents can’t recognize them. That moment is straight out of The Odyssey.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

446. “I think they’re in love.” Sam sniffed, as if the idea of it, love, was ridiculous. “You disapprove, I take it?” “Marx is always in love. He’s an emotional harlot. What does love even mean when you can find it with so many people and things?” “Marx is great,” Sadie said. “I think he’s lucky.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

447. “A little girl hitting a violent predator with a log is hand-to-hand combat and that’s honest. A man, who is represented by a hand, shooting a series of unknown henchmen is dishonest.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

448. “This novel has humor, romance, a touch of suspense, but most of all love – love of books and bookish people and, really, all of humanity in its imperfect glory.” – EOWYN IVEY, author of The Snow Child.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

450. “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