Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

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.

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

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.

And as any mixed-race person will tell you — to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.

but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down a road. And someday, you do not know when, he, or indeed she, will be there. You will be loved because for the first time in your life, you will truly not be alone. You will have chosen to not be alone.

It's a tragic fact to die in an accident

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.

Theo nodded slowly. "You love Balanchine chocolate like I love cacao."

"I wouldn't say love, Theo."

"No, you speak the truth. Love isn't right. It isn't right for me either. Sometimes I hate cacao." Theo looked at me. "You don't love Balanchine chocolate. You are Balanchine chocolate.

There is a time for any fledgling artist where one's taste exceeds one's abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

How much of your life had been happenstance? How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky? But then, weren't all lives that way? Who could say, in the end, that they had chosen any of it?

It is lucky, she thinks, that we don't feel all the love inside us every moment. We couldn't breathe or walk or eat. It is lucky that it just flares up every now and again then resolves itself into a manageable dormancy.

Why was it so hard for him to say he loved her even when she said it to him? He knew he loved her. People who felt far less for each other said "love" all the time, and it didn't mean a thing. And maybe that was the point. He more than loved Sadie Green. There needed to be another word for it.

In reading Twain, I often suspect he is having more fun than I am.

How long does a dream have to last before it's just life?

Why do you keep coming?" she asked.
"Because," he said. Click on this word, he thought, and you will find links to everything it means. Because you are my oldest friend. Because, once, when I was at my lowest, you saved me. Because I might have died without you or ended up in a children's psychiatric hospital. Because I owe you. Because, selfishly, I see a future where we make fantastic games together, if you can manage to get out of bed. "Because," he repeated.