Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

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.

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.

Tragedy is when someone ends up dead.
Everything else is just a bump in the road.

I don't like to feel so crazy about someone," he said. "I don't like to feel like my happiness is so tied up in another person.

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

But this was classic Sam — he had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.

But me-also-thinks my latter-day reaction speaks to the necessity of encountering stories at precisely the right time in our lives. Remember, Maya: 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.

Why are you so quiet?" he asks. Because, you want to say, I am a person with an interior world that you know nothing about.

Can I ask you something?" you said. "How did you ever survive that scandal?"

She said, "I refused to be shamed."

"How did you do that?" you asked.

"When they came at me, I kept coming," she said.

Fuck you. I like you. I'm used to you. You are the one, you asshole. I can't meet someone new.

Dance with me,' Win said. 'I know I'm probably making a fool of myself. You're probably thinking, how many times do I have to reject this guy? Can't he take a hint?'

I shook my head.

'But somehow I don't even care. I see you in your red dress, standing by the punch table, and something in me wants to keep trying. I think, she is a person worth knowing.

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

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.

He doesn't believe in "the one." There are zillions of people in the world; no one is that special.

E. A. Poe defines a short story as readable in a single sitting. I imagine a “single sitting” was longer back in his day. But I digress again.