Gabrielle Zevin Quotations | Page 2

The words you can't find, you borrow.

That Woman is in love with her own grief.

I'm allergic to sad memories. It's the worst.

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

I let myself feel good and sorry for myself, but only for a second. Daddy always said that the most useless of all human emotions was self-pity.

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.

It's a weakness to apologize before hearing what the other person's grievances are. You don't want to end up creating new grievances where there were none to begin with. Another Daddy-ism, if you hadn't already guessed.

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.

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.

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.

There's the tree with the branches that everyone sees, and then there's the upside-down root tree, growing the opposite way. So Earth is the branches, growing in opposing but perfect symmetry. The branches don't think much about the roots, and maybe the roots don't think much about the branches, but all the time, they're connected by the trunk, you know?

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

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.

Diving is a leap of faith plus gravity.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

In life, Jane reflected, the most interesting things tend to happen when you're on your way to do something else.

In you, I found infinity. In you, I was reborn

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

I was just thinking... isn't it lucky that we decided to become co-editors? If one takes a blow to the head, the other can fill in. If the other's lung spontaneoulsy collapses, the one can fill in. It's a perfect system once you think about it." ~Will Landsman

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

I do believe that food lobbies exert enormous, at times insidious, power over what we eat, that our water supplies are not being protected as much as they probably should be and that, in general, people are more interested in smart phones than museums.

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

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.

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