Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

You can either be a bystander who lives his life in reaction to the decisions that others make, or you can be the leader who is making those decisions.

What is the point of bad dates if not to have amusing anecdotes for your friends?

The walls of the bookstore have wood panels up to just above her head, but beyond that is blue wallpaper. Maya can't reach the wallpaper unless she has a chair. The wallpaper has a bumpy, swirling pattern, and it is pleasing to rub her face against it. She will read the word damask in a book one day and thinks, Yes, of course, that's what it's called. In contrast, the word wainscoting will come as a huge disappointment.

He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at least carbonated. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it's love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother. It's completely gotten in the way of his plan to drink himself to death, to drive his business to ruin. The most annoying thing about it is that once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything.

You have had tragedy, yes, but you have had many good friends as well.
"Have I?"
"Yes, Marx and Sadie. They loved you."
"Is two considered many?" Sam asked.
"It depends on how good the friendships are,"
Dong Hyun said.

Liz looks at the tissue box, which is decorated with drawings of snowmen engaged in various holiday activities. One of the snowmen is happily placing a smiling rack of gingerbread men in an oven. Baking gingerbread men, or any cooking for that matter, is probably close to suicide for a snowman, Liz thinks. Why would a snowman voluntarily engage in an activity that would in all likelihood melt him? Can snowmen even eat? Liz glares at the box.

Chocolate doesn't solve everything, Nana."
"It solves a whole heck of a lot, though.

The fish does not die with regrets because the fish cannot love. I die with regrets, and yet I am glad I am not a fish.

A.J. has often reflected that, bit by bit, all the best things in the world are being carved away like fat from meat. First, it had been the record stores, and then the video stores, and then newspapers and magazines, and now even the big chain bookstores were disappearing everywhere you looked. From his point of view, the only thing worse than a world with big chain bookstores was a world with NO big chain bookstores.

"What were you like," I asked her. "we're you happy? Or were you smiling because they told you to?"

When she told me it was her favorite, it suggested to me strange and wonderful things about her character that I had not guessed, dark places that I might like to visit. People tell boring lies about politics, God, and love. You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?

It had not been a lonely childhood, though many of her intimates had been somewhat less than real.

On Elsewhere we fool ourselves into thinking we know what will be just because we know the amount of time we have left. We know this, but we never really know what will be. We never know what will happen...

In certain seasons,
We may be nourished by
The idea of the carrot
More than the carrot itself.

The day my father shook my hand, I knew I was a writer.