Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

It's a well-known fact that hate shows up on your face once you're forty.

Daddy used to say that calling a person a romantic was just another way of saying he or she acted without regard for conseqences.

People are capable of great, great change during the span of one lifetime. And women even more than men.

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.

She is seventy, and she believes you try new things or you may as well die.

I've been blue, lately," Sam admitted. "And I wondered, how do you get over that sort of thing?" "Work helps," Sadie said. "Games help. But sometimes, when I'm really low, I keep a particular image in my mind." "What is it?" "I imagine people playing. Sometimes, it's one of our games, but sometimes, it's any game. The thing I find profoundly hopeful when I'm feeling despair is to imagine people playing, to believe that no matter how bad the world gets, there will always be players.

It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she had arrived. But life was always arriving.

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.

Oh yes, it's very tragic. Why does everyone always like love stories? What about absence-of-love stories? Aren't they much more common?

Sam would later tell people that these mazes were his first attempts at writing games. "A maze," he would say, "is a video game distilled to its purest form." Maybe so, but this was revisionist and self-aggrandizing. The mazes were for Sadie. To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.

Well, for one, you have to remember not to scream. Once you have their attention, whispering is much more effective. Screaming ghosts scare people, you know

How angry he had been at Sadie! How much righteous passion he had devoted to holding this grudge! He had thought himself so mature when he'd decided to cut her out of his life, but his reaction had been embarrassingly childish and over-the-top. He'd once tried to explain the falling-out to Marx, and Marx had not even understood it. No, Sam had said, you don't understand. It's the principle. She was pretending to be my friend, but she was just doing it for community service. Marx had looked at Sam blankly, and then he said, No one spends hundreds of hours doing anything out of charity, Sam. Thinking of this and looking at the little paperweight, Sam's heart swelled with love for Sadie. 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.

What I think you should consider...is the rarity of finding a playmate.

It's a tragic fact to die in an accident

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