Top 100 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes
#1. Maya, having recently made her way through The Lord of the Rings trilogy, names it Bag End. "Because it looks as if a hobbit might live here." A.J. kisses his daughter on the forehead. He is delighted to have produced such a fantastic nerd.
Gabrielle Zevin
#2. He knows she isn't perfect. She knows he definitely isn't perfect. They know there's no such thing as perfect.
Gabrielle Zevin
#3. Lies can sound awfully pretty when a girl is in love with the person telling them.
Gabrielle Zevin
#4. 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.
Gabrielle Zevin
#5. When the baby sees Ismay, she bawls. "She must miss her mother," Ismay says. "Maybe I remind her of her mother?" A.J. nods, though he thinks the real cause is that his sister-in-law frightens the baby.
Gabrielle Zevin
#6. And then, because the world is relentless this way, it was spring.
Gabrielle Zevin
#7. Did you have a ship?" Maya asks. "Yes. It had books on it, and it really was more of a research vessel. We studied a lot." "You're ruining this story." "It's a fact, Maya. There are murdering kinds of pirates and researching kinds of pirates, and your daddy was the latter.
Gabrielle Zevin
#9. Daddy once said, If you don't know what you believe, Annie, you'll be a lost soul.
Gabrielle Zevin
#10. 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.
Gabrielle Zevin
#11. Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you're the only person in the room.
Gabrielle Zevin
#12. Evey day, there is less of me. Today I am thoughts without words. Tomorrow I will be a body without thoughts. And so it goes.
Gabrielle Zevin
#13. Infinite Jest is a masterpiece," Harvey had said. "Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life," A.J.
Gabrielle Zevin
#14. It began with a coin toss. The coin came up tails; I was heads.
Gabrielle Zevin
#15. Death is a state of mind
many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.
Gabrielle Zevin
#16. When dad says he's going to church, he actually means he's going to a library or a bookstore. - Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac.
Gabrielle Zevin
#17. I knew near everything about him, and he knew near everything about me, and all that made our quite a kind of song.
Gabrielle Zevin
#18. Daddy always said that an option that you know to have a bad outcome is only a fool's option, i.e., not an option at all. And I liked to think that Daddy hadn't raised a fool.
Gabrielle Zevin
#19. You have a thousand chances to make something right. That's a heck of a lot of chances, by the way. But they do run out eventually.
Gabrielle Zevin
#21. Life is messy," Dr. Lau was fond of saying. "Deal with it. If you're judging it, you're not really seeing it.
Gabrielle Zevin
#22. 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.
Gabrielle Zevin
#23. Oh," says Owen, "but I would have, you know."
"I know you would have," says Liz, "and knowing you would have is nearly as good.
Gabrielle Zevin
#24. Maybe if I'd been braver in that moment, I would have cried.
Gabrielle Zevin
#25. An echo makes good company, Old Margaret said. Whenever I'm lonely, I always try to find one to talk to. They're much better than mirrors. Mirrors say nasty things about you. Echoes are far more supportive. They think whatever you say is completely brilliant.
Gabrielle Zevin
#26. Does it count for anything that I just told you I love you?" Gable asked.
I considered this briefly before deciding that it didn't. "Not really. Not when I know you don't mean it.
Gabrielle Zevin
#27. And when she dreams, she dreams of a girl who was lost at sea but one day found the shore.
Gabrielle Zevin
#29. I know you did, lass. You're the toughest girl I know." "'Lass'? Where did that come from?" "I don't know. I just felt the urge to call you that.
Gabrielle Zevin
#30. They were an indistinct blur of pastel and white uniforms, like chalk doodles on a sidewalk in the rain
Gabrielle Zevin
#31. 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.
Gabrielle Zevin
#32. Sometimes, readers, when they're young, are given, say, a book like 'Moby Dick' to read. And it is an interesting, complicated book, but it's not something that somebody who has never read a book before should be given as an example of why you'll really love to read, necessarily.
Gabrielle Zevin
#33. It's hard to believe. Where does the times go?' Betty sighs. 'I've always hated that phrase. It makes it would like time went on a holiday, and is expected back any day now. Time flies is another one I hate. Apparently, time does quite a bit of traveling, though.
Gabrielle Zevin
#34. But I wondered if all this kissing was a bad habit with him and me. The thing we did with our mouths instead of talking.
Gabrielle Zevin
#35. 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.
Gabrielle Zevin
#36. She is seventy, and she believes you try new things or you may as well die.
Gabrielle Zevin
#37. I thought of summer as the living time; the rest of the year was the backward time, the writing time
Gabrielle Zevin
#39. Always with a book and content at home or at the store.
Gabrielle Zevin
#40. loathe collectible books anyway. People getting all moony over particular paper carcasses. It's the ideas that matter, man.
Gabrielle Zevin
#42. Fuck you. I like you. I'm used to you. You are the one, you asshole. I can't meet someone new.
Gabrielle Zevin
#43. There's something kind of heroic about being a bookseller.
Gabrielle Zevin
#44. As a form, the picture book has a similar elegance to the short story.
Gabrielle Zevin
#45. Do you like Moby Dick?" he asks.
"I hate it," she says. "And I don't say that about many things. Teachers assign it, and parents are happy because their kids are reading something of 'quality.' But it's forcing kids to read books like that that make them think they hate reading.
Gabrielle Zevin
#46. I'm very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it's great to be aware of how publishing works.
Gabrielle Zevin
#48. You forget all of it anyway ... You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not ... You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They're the last to go. And then once you've forgotten enough, you love someone else.
Gabrielle Zevin
#49. Babies move more than books and aren't as conveniently shaped.
Gabrielle Zevin
#50. When small wounds are left untreated, they can fest and become far more serious injuries. -Mr. Kipling
Gabrielle Zevin
#51. He felt comfortable and broken-in like favourite jeans
Gabrielle Zevin
#52. What are you reading?" Owen asks.
"Charlotte's Web," Liz says. "It's really sad. One of the main characters just died."
"You ought to read the book from end to beginning," Owen jokes. "That way, no one dies, and it's always a happy ending.
Gabrielle Zevin
#53. My actual daddy used to say that if you didn't let some things go, you'd spend your whole life fighting -Anya/Mr. Balanchine
Gabrielle Zevin
#55. I hate book parties," A.J. says. "But you run the bookstore," Lambiase says. "It's a problem," A.J. admits.
Gabrielle Zevin
#56. It's easier to be happy than to be sad. Being sad takes alot of work. It's exhausting
Gabrielle Zevin
#57. A.J. notices an Elmo doll sitting on the floor with a note attached to his matted red chest by a safety pin. He sets the baby down and picks up Elmo, a character A.J. has always despised because he seems too needy.
Gabrielle Zevin
#58. The truth is, sometimes too much can happen in a relationship, and then there's nothing anyone can do or say. It's broken.
Gabrielle Zevin
#60. He doesn't believe in "the one." There are zillions of people in the world; no one is that special.
Gabrielle Zevin
#61. No one travels without purpose. Those who are lost wish to be lost.
Gabrielle Zevin
#62. He's in the military, serving overseas in Afghanistan."
"Well done. You're marrying an American hero," A.J. says.
"I guess I am."
"I hate those guys," he says. "They make me feel totally inadequate. Tell me something shitty about him so that I feel better.
Gabrielle Zevin
#63. 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.
Gabrielle Zevin
#64. When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.
Gabrielle Zevin
#65. 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.
Gabrielle Zevin
#66. Imagine getting to be one of those people who actually gets paid to talk about literature.
Gabrielle Zevin
#67. I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn't a reader yet has just not found the right book.
Gabrielle Zevin
#68. It is a lie that people who love each other must know everything about each other. Love must occasionally allow for a gap.
Gabrielle Zevin
#69. 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.
Gabrielle Zevin
#71. The kind of people who spend their lives as permanent guests on a futon are not the kind of people you want to know.
Gabrielle Zevin
#72. All women are many women! I'm afraid you've never known very much about women.
Gabrielle Zevin
#73. Dancing was a kind of surrender to feeling, to sound, to the present -Anya
Gabrielle Zevin
#74. Dad. What a word. What a little big word. What a word and what a world! He is crying. His heart is too full, and no words to release it. I know what words do, he thinks. They let us feel less. "No,
Gabrielle Zevin
#75. The problem with meeting new people is not that you might not like them, but that you will like them too much.
Gabrielle Zevin
#78. The fish does not die with regrets because the fish cannot love. I die with regrets, and yet I am glad I am not a fish.
Gabrielle Zevin
#79. I told him I didn't want to have sex until I got married. Without missing a beat, he nodded and said, So let's get married.
Gabrielle Zevin
#80. His eyes were blazing and I swear I could smell the testosterone coming off him.
Gabrielle Zevin
#81. Oh yes, it's very tragic. Why does everyone always like love stories? What about absence-of-love stories? Aren't they much more common?
Gabrielle Zevin
#82. My dad always says to listen for the pauses when you want to know if someone's hiding something.
Gabrielle Zevin
#83. Every generation spins the wheel,Anya, and where it lands defines 'the good'. Funny thing is they never know that they're spining it, and it hits something different every time.
Gabrielle Zevin
#85. Hi there," squeaked a precocious little voice, "you are speaking to Chloe Fusakawa, and I have just learned how to answer the phone.
Gabrielle Zevin
#86. You wouldn't be abandoning me if you stopped to get a Band-Aid, you know.
Gabrielle Zevin
#87. My beautiful Win. I wanted to kiss him on every last broken place, but his mother and my lawyer were there. So, instead I started to cry.
Gabrielle Zevin
#88. My life is in these books. Read these and know my heart. We are not quire novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works.
Gabrielle Zevin
#89. He writes a paragraph a day. A paragraph for Maya. It isn't much, but it's what he has left to give. He
Gabrielle Zevin
#90. There's a strange sort of quiet when you're dying. It's as if you're in a glass room, and the walls keep getting thicker and thicker.
Gabrielle Zevin
#92. In the future, he will rethink his unlocked-door policy. Though it had occurred to him that something might be stolen, he had never considered the possibility that something might be left.
Gabrielle Zevin
#93. Despite what I said before, it had not been a fear of infecting other people or poor health that had stopped me from going, but vanity.
It was a good lesson.
Gabrielle Zevin
#94. We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone.
Gabrielle Zevin
#95. Most people's problems would be solved if they would only give more things a chance.
Gabrielle Zevin
#96. Sometimes, this good old world does not much care what you believe.
Gabrielle Zevin
#97. I have so much paperwork. I'm afraid my paperwork has paperwork.
Gabrielle Zevin
#98. Life is messy. Deal with it. If you're judging it, you're not really seeing it -Dr. Lau
Gabrielle Zevin
#99. Good morning, magazines! Good morning, bookmarks! Good morning, books!
Gabrielle Zevin
#100. Each period had required me to be a slightly different person, and that was exhausting. I wondered if school had always felt this way and whether it was like this for everone.
Gabrielle Zevin
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