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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The only love she inspires is the canine kind.

The words you can't find, you borrow. We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart. We are not quite novels. The analogy he is looking for is almost there. We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that. In the end, we are collected works.

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

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.

Should have. Would have. Could have. Didn't.

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

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

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.

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.

What are you reading?" Owen asks. "Charlotte's Web," Liz says. "It's really sad. One of the main characters just died." "You ought to read the book from end to beginning," Owen jokes. "That way, no one dies, and it's always a happy ending.