Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

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.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

You forget all of it anyway. First, you forget everything you learned-the dates of the Hay-Herran Treaty and Pythagorean Theorem. You especially forget everything you didn't really learn, but just memorized the night before. You forget the names of all but one or two of your teachers, and eventually you'll forget those, too. You forget your junior class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend's home phone number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times. For me, it was something by Simon & Garfunkel. Who knows what it will be for you? And eventually, but slowly, oh so slowly, you forget your humiliations-even the ones that seemed indelible just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. Who went to a good college. Who threw the best parties Who could get you pot. 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

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

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.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

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

~ Gabrielle Zevin

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

~ Gabrielle Zevin

...an irresistible of why we read and why we love.We are not quite novels.We are not quite short stories.In the end, we are collected works.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

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

~ Gabrielle Zevin

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

~ Gabrielle Zevin

All of these teeth had once been in real, live people. They had talked and smiled and eaten and sang and cursed and prayed. They had brushed and flossed and died. In English class, we read poems about death, but here, right in front of me was a poem about death too.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

There's a difference between being alive and living.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

If this were a novel, I'd stop reading right now. I'd throw it across the room.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

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

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

~ Gabrielle Zevin

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

~ Gabrielle Zevin

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

I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn't be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children's books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

A place is not really a place without a bookstore.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

And then, despite the fact that A. J. does not believe in God, he closes his eyes and thanks whomever, the higher power, with all his porcupine heart.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

People are capable of great, great change during the span of one lifetime. And women even more than men.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

All women are many women! I'm afraid you've never known very much about women.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

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

Why are you crying?I was reading.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

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

~ Gabrielle Zevin

But then again, maybe 'I will' is nicer. It has the future in it. 'I do' just has the present.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

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

~ Gabrielle Zevin

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

~ Gabrielle Zevin

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

Since i couldn't remember the real first time i'd lost my virginity, this would have become my de facto first time. I wanted a better story then: I did it with this boy who i wasn't very into and who had mysterious Gaterade breath; in his room decorated with sports equipment; at least he was nice enough to provide condoms and get his ancient, horny dog to leave us along.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

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

~ Gabrielle Zevin

The words you can't find, you borrow.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

I know he's a good person. And he said he was sorry. And I love him. And when you love a person, you have to forgive him sometimes.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

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.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

That Woman is in love with her own grief.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

Every book is a world.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

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

~ Gabrielle Zevin

Despite the fact that he loves books and owns a bookstore, A.J. does not particularly care for writers. He finds them to be unkempt, narcissistic, silly, and generally unpleasant people. He tries to avoid the ones who've written books he loves for fear that they will ruin their books for him.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

But I loved those books or at least that first one. And I felt somewhere down deep inside him the person who wrote it must 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

Above all, mine is a love story. Unlike most love stories, this one involves chance, gravity, a dash of head trauma. It began with a coin toss. The coin came up tails. I was heads. Had it gone my way, there might not be a story at all. Just a chapter, or a sentence in a book whose greater theme had yet to be determined. Maybe this chapter would've had the faintest whisper of love about it. But maybe not. Sometimes, a girl needs to lose.

~ Gabrielle Zevin