Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets.

Remember that a fine education can be found in places other than the usual.

For the record, everything new is not worse than everything old.

You are not a beautiful girl, and even if you were, you know that is not related to how much sex a person has. Plenty of ugly people have sex. Plenty of ordinary people have sex. Plenty of beautiful people spend their nights alone.

What's everyone talking about?
"The end of The Iliad."
"That's the best part," Marx said.
"Why is it the best part?" Sadie asked.
"Because it's perfect," Marx said. "'Tamer of horses' is an honest profession. The lines mean that one doesn't have to be a god or a king for your life to have meaning.

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

novels certainly have their charms, but the most elegant creation in the prose universe is a short story. Master the short story and you'll have mastered the world,

If you're always aiming for perfection, you won't make anything at all.

Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met — he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn't truly understood the nature of Marx's good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know — were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before. My God, she thought, he is so easy to love. "Shouldn't you wash that?" Sadie asked.

A.J. nods out of politeness, but he doesn't believe in random acts. He is a reader, and what he believes in is narrative construction. If a gun appears in act one, that gun had better go off by act three.

Long relationships might be richer, but relatively brief, relatively uncomplicated encounters with interesting people could be lovely as well. Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.

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

In life, Jane reflected, the most interesting things tend to happen when you're on your way to do something else.

To return to the city of one's birth always felt like retreat.

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.