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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

421. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “I didn’t call you because I had met someone better, and when that didn’t work out, I decided to give you a second chance. So don’t be thinking you’re superior. You’ve got a decent smile, I’ll give you that, but your teeth are too big and so is your ass and you’re not twenty-five anymore even if you drink like you are. You shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

440. “He’s got one thick book. He’s in the middle of Infinite Jest. You ever heard of it?”

— Gabrielle Zevin

441. “When you have children, you’ll never be able to worry about a friend as much again,” Dov said. “I’m tired,” Sadie said. “I should go.” Sadie hung up the phone. She pulled Sam’s blanket over her head, and then she went to sleep.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

442. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

444. “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

445. “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

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

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

— Gabrielle Zevin

449. “She almost seemed to be an extension of him, and he, of her.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

450. “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