Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

You don't choose a book the book chooses you

On the night Sam went missing, it occurred to Sadie that nothing in life was as solid-state as it appeared. A childish game could be deadly. A friend might disappear. And as much as a person might try to shield herself from it, the possibility for the other outcome was always there. We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn't chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living. Sometimes, it felt as if you might be walking down Brattle Street, and without warning, you could slip into this other life, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole that led to Wonderland. But it wouldn't be strange like Wonderland, not at all. Because you would have expected all along that it could have turned out that way. You would feel relief, because you had always wondered what that other life would have looked like. And there you were.

Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans. Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.

I have so much paperwork. I'm afraid my paperwork has paperwork.

My beautiful Win. I wanted to kiss him on every last broken place, but his mother and my lawyer were there. So, instead I started to cry.

art doesn't typically get made by happy people.

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.

It was funny how dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or the other. Sometimes it's hard to tell.

I see gaming as having the possibility to be a profoundly empathetic experience. I think the idea of the gamer, like the capital-G Gamer, this kind of misogynist dude shouting insults at women, is antiquated and not true. If you look at it, there are so many people that have played games their entire lives, like myself, that don’t necessarily identify themselves as gamers in that sense...the idea that, again, the person who is a gamer is somebody who is less empathetic, less romantic, or less trying to seek human connection is sort of old fashioned or possibly just ignorant.

Sadie walked under the gates, one by one by one. At first, she felt nothing, but as she kept moving ahead, she began to feel an opening and a new spaciousness in her chest. She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another.
She walked through another gate.
It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn't.)
She walked through another gate.
What was a gate, anyway?
A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.
By the time she reached the end of the torii gate pathway, she felt resolved. Both Sides had failed, but it didn't have to be the end. The game was one in a long line of spaces between gates.

There's no game without the NPCs. There's just some bullshit hero, wandering around with no one to talk to and nothing to do.

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.

A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.

Why are you here?" I asked him.
"That's an awfully big question, Anya."
"No, I meant here outside this office. What did you do wrong?"

"Multiple choice," he said. "(a) A few pointed comments I made in Theology. (b) Headmaster wants to have a chat with the new kid about wearing hats in school. (c) My schedule. I'm just too darn smart for my classes. (d) My eyewitness account of the girl who poured lasagna over her boyfriend's head. (e.) Headmaster's leaving her husband and wants to run away with me. (f) None of the above. (g) All of the above."

"Ex-boyfriend," I mumbled.
"Good to know," he said.

If someone tells you there will be trouble, believe them.