Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

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

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.

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

Diving is a leap of faith plus gravity.

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

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.

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

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

In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know. For everyone else, it's just another end.

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.

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

A place isn't a place until it has a bookstore.

Did you know that there are over three hundred words for love in canine?

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

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 don't believe in writer's block.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

Daddy always said you only explained things to the people that actually mattered.

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

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

Why do two people fall in love? It's a mystery.

It was such a sweet, sad song with such sweet, sad lyrics. Old-fashioned a little, but also timeless.

You can't avoid orphan stories, child. Every story is an orphan story. We are all orphaned sooner or later.

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

Eye contact made people think you were being truthful even if you weren't.

The words you can't find, you borrow.

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.

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

It's a tragic fact to die in an accident

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

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.

Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.

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.

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.

That Woman is in love with her own grief.

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.

I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.

My heart was a little bit broken, but I still had to go to school. I buttoned my dress shirt over it and my winter coat, too. I hoped it didn't show too much.

You tell a kid he doesn't like to read, and he'll believe you

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.

I don't think I would have minded you being the keeper of my secrets.

Covers matter. In my experience, a different cover can make you think you're reading an entirely different book.