Gabrielle Zevin citations

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

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

“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.”

“It is a lie that people who love each other must know everything about each other. Love must occasionally allow for a gap.”

“Someday, we’ll run into each other again, I know it.
Maybe I’ll be older and smarter and just plain better. If that happens,
that’s when I’ll deserve you. But now, at this moment, you can’t hook
your boat to mine, because I’m liable to sink us both.”

“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.”

“You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question”

“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.”

“We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on”

“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.”

“Remember, Maya: the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.”

“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?”

“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”

“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.”