Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

“It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.”

“No one actually needs another person or another person's love to survive. Love is when we have irrationally convinced ourselves that we do.”

“Sometimes things seem so unbearable in the middle of the night, don't they? In the middle of the night, we're all such children.”

“Death is a state of mind---many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.”

“Every word the right one and exactly where it should be. That's basically the highest compliment I can give.”

“Daddy always said the only thing worth begging for was your life, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe sometimes your love is a little bit worth begging for, too.”

“Love you,” Maya says. “Yes, she keeps saying that,” A. J. says. “I warned her about giving love that hasn’t yet been earned, but honestly, I think it’s the influence of that insidious Elmo. He loves everyone, you know?”

“Why do two people fall in love? It's a mystery.”

“Love stories are written in millimeters and milliseconds with a fast, dull pencil whose marks you can barely see, they are written in miles and eons with a chisel on the side of a mountiantop”

“A question I've thought about a great deal is why it is so much easier to write about the things we dislike/hate/acknowledge to be flawed than the things we love.”

“I've been a police officer for twenty years now and I'll tell you, pretty much every bad thing is life is a result of bad timing, and every good thing is the result of good timing.”

“When I was in my twenties and broke, I'd buy books before food. A meal will sustain you for a few hours, a good book will sustain you for life.”

“Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.”

“Saying you're through with romance is like saying you're done with living, Betty. Life is better with a little romance, you know.”

“In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know. For everyone else, it's just another end.”

“Sometimes books don't find us until the right time.”

“It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him. Apparently I could.”

“The analogy he is looking for is almost there. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that.”

“I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.”

“But I believe good things happen everyday. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that's life, isn't it?”

“We are not quite novels.
We are not quite short stories.
In the end, we are collected works.”

“They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.”

“… lies can sound awfully pretty when a girl is in love with the person telling them.”

“They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?”

“People, you'll find, aren't usually all good or bad. Sometimes they're just a little bit good and a whole lot bad. And sometimes they're mostly good with a dash of bad. And most of us, well, we fall in the middle somewhere.”

“I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart.”

“I did learn something about insanity while I was down there. People go crazy, not because they are crazy, but because it's the best available option at the time.”

“A place ain’t a place without a bookstore”

“A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.”

“Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you're the only person in the room.”

“I wondered if the person who really loves you is the person who knows all your stories, the person who WANTS to know all your stories.”

“Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A. J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again.”

“There's a pleasure to loving someone even when you know there's no chance in them loving you back. The pain I felt let me know I was still alive.”

“Sorry but nothing of much importance ever happened to me… I'm just a girl who forgot to look both ways before crossing the street.”

“As many have discovered, it is entirely possible (although not particularly desirable) to love two people with all your heart. It is entirely possible to long for two lives, to feel that one life can't come close to containing it all.”

“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.”

“The scent is sweet and meloncholy. A bit like dying, a bit like falling in love.”

“What were you like," I asked her. "we're you happy? Or were you smiling because they told you to?”

“I let myself feel good and sorry for myself, but only for a second. Daddy always said that the most useless of all human emotions was self-pity.”

“There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backwards, she thinks. She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had.”

“Most people's problems would be solved if they would only give more things a chance.”

“My heart was a little bit broken, but I still had to go to school. I buttoned my dress shirt over it and my winter coat, too. I hoped it didn't show too much.”

“It was odd to have something so personal out there in that way, but the good thing about art is that no one necessarily knows what you mean by it anyway.”

“And when she dreams, she dreams of a girl who was lost at sea but one day found the shore.”

“Daddy always said you only explained things to the people that actually mattered.”

“And I was crying for gravity. It had sent me down the stairs, and I'd thought that meant something, but maybe it was just the direction that all things tend to flow.”

“The words you can't find, you borrow.”

“Should have. Would have. Could have. Didn't.”

“The difficulty of living alone is that any mess he makes he is forced to clean up himself.

No, the real difficulty of living alone is that no one cares if you are upset.”

“Who are these people who think a book comes with a guarantee that they will like it?”

“When I read a book, I want you to be reading it at the same time. I want to know what would Amelia think of it. I want you to be mine. I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart, Amy.”

“Maya, we are what we love. We are that we love.”

“Remember that a fine education can be found in places other than the usual.”

“Intimacy doesn't have all that much to do with backseats of cars. Real intimacy is brushing your teeth together.”

“If you are going to forgive a person, Liz decides, it is best to do it sooner rather than later. Later, Liz knows from experience, could be sooner than you thought.”

“Tragedy is when someone ends up dead. Everything else is just a bump in the road. For the record, that was something Daddy used to say.”

“Wounds are like water set to boil – they heal best left unwatched…”

“Let's stay young forever. Young, stupid, and pretty. Sounds like a plan, don't you think?”

“On Elsewhere we fool ourselves into thinking we know what will be just because we know the amount of time we have left. We know this, but we never really know what will be. We never know what will happen…”

“I'm allergic to sad memories. It's the worst.”

“You tell a kid he doesn't like to read, and he'll believe you”

“But then again maybe "I will" is nicer. It has a future in it.”

“I have so much paperwork. I'm afraid my paperwork has paperwork.”

“The baby, a girl, is born at 6:24 a. m.
She weighs six pounds, ten ounces.
The mother takes the baby in her arms and asks her, "Who are you, my little one?"
And in response, this baby, who is Liz and not Liz at the same time, laughs.”

“His heart is too full, and no words to release it.”

“Did you know that there are over three hundred words for love in canine?”