Top 100 Gabrielle Zevin Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Maybe if I'd been braver in that moment, I would have cried.
Gabrielle Zevin
#3. In a way, publishing in 2005 was similar to publishing in 1950. Nobody kept blogs; that was still optional. I didn't even have a website then.
Gabrielle Zevin
#4. 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
#5. THE AWARD CEREMONY is held at a high school in Hyannis. Though it's just a gymnasium (the scent of balls of both varieties is still palpable) and the ceremony hasn't started yet, everyone speaks in hushed tones, like it's church. Something important and literary is about to happen here.
Gabrielle Zevin
#6. I think you can do a lot, like describing people with their physical characteristics, things like that, but to me, I've always found it to be a much more informative question to ask somebody what they read.
Gabrielle Zevin
#7. It was funny how dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or the other. Sometimes it's hard to tell.
Gabrielle Zevin
#8. 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
#9. 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 ...
Gabrielle Zevin
#11. From Nic's point of view, her older sister had been a primer on how not to live her life.
Gabrielle Zevin
#12. But you, you can never do anything hard. And I let you be that way.
Gabrielle Zevin
#13. In the fifteen or so years he has known her, A.J. thinks Ismay has aged like an actress should: from Juliet to Ophelia to Gertrude to Hecate.
Gabrielle Zevin
#14. 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?
Gabrielle Zevin
#15. 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
#16. She doesn't recognize the number - none of her friends use their phones as phones anymore.
Gabrielle Zevin
#17. I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn't turned out to be.
Gabrielle Zevin
#18. 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.
Gabrielle Zevin
#19. What is the point of bad dates if not to have amusing anecdotes for your friends?
Gabrielle Zevin
#20. Well, for one, you have to remember not to scream. Once you have their attention, whispering is much more effective. Screaming ghosts scare people, you know
Gabrielle Zevin
#22. How long does a dream have to last before it's just life?
Gabrielle Zevin
#24. 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
#25. I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart.
Gabrielle Zevin
#26. 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
#27. Rosie crosses her arm. "That's one of those things you say to sound smart, right?" she says. "But, really, you're trying to make someone else feel stupid.
Gabrielle Zevin
#28. It gets more exciting," Imogen assured her. "You must be patient, Galina."
"If it takes too long, I'll be dead," Nana replied.
Gabrielle Zevin
#29. They were an indistinct blur of pastel and white uniforms, like chalk doodles on a sidewalk in the rain
Gabrielle Zevin
#30. You want less crime? Make it so there are less criminals.
Gabrielle Zevin
#31. Lights, bright enough to dilate her eyes. Horns, flaccid and come too late. Metal crumpling like tissue. The body was not in pain but only because the body was gone, elsewhere. Yes, Daniel thinks just after impact but before death, like that. The passage hadn't been as bad as he had thought.
Gabrielle Zevin
#32. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down the road and someday, you do not now when, you will make a wrong tun. At the end of the road, when you're least expecting it, he (or indeed she) will be there.
Gabrielle Zevin
#33. 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.
Gabrielle Zevin
#34. I don't think I would have minded you being the keeper of my secrets.
Gabrielle Zevin
#35. It's sad when you think about it, but also kind of beautiful.
Gabrielle Zevin
#36. 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
#37. A.J. feels for the engagement ring in his pocket. Is this the moment? No, too Jumbotron.
Gabrielle Zevin
#39. I've made room for you, she said. if you want it, there's room.
Gabrielle Zevin
#41. You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?
Gabrielle Zevin
#42. She was pretty and smart, which makes her death a tragedy. She was poor and black, which means people say they saw it coming.
Gabrielle Zevin
#43. Anya: The more I think about dancing, the more I don't get it
Scarlet: Sop thinking. That's the key.
Gabrielle Zevin
#44. And when she dreams, she dreams of a girl who was lost at sea but one day found the shore.
Gabrielle Zevin
#45. 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
#46. Take heart, Maya. As a bookseller, I assure you that prizewinning can be somewhat important for sales but rarely matters much in terms of quality.
Gabrielle Zevin
#47. In life, Jane reflected, the most interesting things tend to happen when you're on your way to do something else.
Gabrielle Zevin
#48. No, I've been doing this myself forever. I could have gone in here myself, but my daddy doesn't want me to get raped. That happens all the time in bathrooms.
Gabrielle Zevin
#50. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.
Gabrielle Zevin
#51. 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
#52. Elmo, a character A.J. has always despised because he seems too needy. "Elmo!
Gabrielle Zevin
#54. 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
#55. And then, because the world is relentless this way, it was spring.
Gabrielle Zevin
#56. I'm like a unicorn; I'm a midlist writer who hasn't done anything else but write. But because I wasn't amazingly famous, I didn't become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan Franzen or a Joshua Ferris.
Gabrielle Zevin
#57. 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
Gabrielle Zevin
#58. When we're young we think everything has to be wrapped up in a month. But you should take the long view on this one. Before you make a move, be sure, Anya. And even once you're sure, tread carefully. And remember you don't have to do what they expect you to do" -Charles Delacroix
Gabrielle Zevin
#59. Once I surrendered to it, all I tasted was the sweetness.
Gabrielle Zevin
#60. 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
#61. 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
#63. He is thinking about his brain. It strikes him that it is odd to have to use the thing that may not be working to consider the thing that isn't working.
Gabrielle Zevin
#64. People choose to read, and it takes effort. It's not one of those hobbies that asks nothing of the person who is doing it. It's more than a hobby.
Gabrielle Zevin
#65. Daddy once said, If you don't know what you believe, Annie, you'll be a lost soul.
Gabrielle Zevin
#66. 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.
Gabrielle Zevin
#67. Betty inhales sharply, 'It's just I thought I had lost you forever.'
Oh, Betty, don't you know there's no such thing as forever?
Gabrielle Zevin
#68. It's when you don't need something that you tend to lose it.
Gabrielle Zevin
#70. Lies can sound awfully pretty when a girl is in love with the person telling them.
Gabrielle Zevin
#71. I love having sex with you," she says. "If you're a vegetable when this is done, can I still have sex with you?
Gabrielle Zevin
#72. Ask two people to tell you anything, you'll get two versions. Even easy things like directions, let alone important or semi-controversial topics like why a fight started or what a person was generally like. If you don't know something for yourself, you just can't be sure.
Gabrielle Zevin
#73. Daddy always said you only explained things to the people that actually mattered.
Gabrielle Zevin
#74. That spring, Amelia takes Maya to the drugstore and lets her choose any polish color she likes. "How do you pick?" Maya says.
"Sometimes I ask myself how I'm feeling," Amelia says. "Sometimes I ask myself how I'd like to be feeling.
Gabrielle Zevin
#75. He knows she isn't perfect. She knows he definitely isn't perfect. They know there's no such thing as perfect.
Gabrielle Zevin
#76. 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
#77. People like what they like, and that's the great and terrible thing.
Gabrielle Zevin
#78. 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
#79. But I loved his books, or at least that first one. And I felt that somewhere down deep inside him the person who wrote it must still be there. That you couldn't write such beautiful things and have such an ugly heart. But that is the truth. He was a beautiful writer and a terrible person.
Gabrielle Zevin
#80. Is a twist less satisfying if you know it's coming? Is a twist that you can't predict symptomatic of bad construction? These are things to consider when writing.
Gabrielle Zevin
#81. Galina: You want to control the world and everyone in it, but you can't. Let whatever this is - and it's likely nothing - play out ...
Anya: So we do nothing?
Galina: Sometimes that's the only thing to do.
Gabrielle Zevin
#82. Death is a state of mind
many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.
Gabrielle Zevin
#83. It began with a coin toss. The coin came up tails; I was heads.
Gabrielle Zevin
#84. Every word the right one and exactly where it should be. That's basically the highest compliment I can give.
Gabrielle Zevin
#85. In Amelia's experience, most people's problems would be solved if they would only give more things a chance. Amelia
Gabrielle Zevin
#86. 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
#87. The theme of the dance was "Great Romances," or some such nonsense. There were projections of supposedly great couples from the past on the walls of the gym. Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Hermione and Ron, Bonnie and Clyde, etc.
Gabrielle Zevin
#88. Oh, you don't want to hear all my sad stories. I can't even bear to tell them anymore. Screw the past, right?
Gabrielle Zevin
#90. Remember that a fine education can be found in places other than the usual.
Gabrielle Zevin
#92. 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
#93. I'm not crying for you. I'm crying for me. Do you know how long it took me to find you? Do you know how many awful dates I've been on? I can't" - she is breathless now - "I can't join Match again. I just can't.
Gabrielle Zevin
#94. Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you're the only person in the room.
Gabrielle Zevin
#95. Read these and know my heart. We are not quite novels.
Gabrielle Zevin
#96. 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,
Gabrielle Zevin
#97. In my opinion, wounds are like water boiled
they heal best left unwatched.
Gabrielle Zevin
#98. 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
#99. A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.
Gabrielle Zevin
#100. The most annoying thing about it is that once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything.
Gabrielle Zevin
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