Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?

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

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

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

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?

The only love she inspires is the canine kind.

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.

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

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.

On, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that’s not how it works. A human life is a beautiful mess.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have so much paperwork. I’m afraid my paperwork has paperwork.

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

Wounds are like water set to boil – they heal best left unwatched.

Diving is a leap of faith plus gravity.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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