Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

Oh, all stories are the same, aren't they? Men and women fall in love or out of love. People are born; people die. It al ends happily or it all ends sadly, and the difference matters only to the people involved.

If your last words are somehow meant to encapsulate your entire existence, Liz finds um strangely appropriate. Um means nothing. Um is what you say while you're thinking of what you'll really say. Um suggests someone interrupted before they'd begun. Um is a fifteen-year-old girl who gets hit by a taxicab in front of a mall on the way to help pick out a prom dress for a prom she isn't even going to, for God's sake.

Promise me, we won't ever do this again," Sadie said. "Promise me, that no matter what happens, no matter what dumb thing we supposedly perpetrate on each other, we won't ever go six years without talking to each other. Promise me you'll always forgive me, and I promise I'll always forgive you." These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.

He was tired of having to move so carefully, of having to be so careful. He wanted to be able to skip, for God's sake. He wanted to be Ichigo. He wanted to surf, and ski, and parasail, and fly, and scale mountains and buildings. He wanted to die a million deaths like Ichigo, and no matter what damage was inflicted on his body during the day, he'd wake up tomorrow, new and whole. He wanted Ichigo's life, a lifetime of endless, immaculate tomorrows, free of mistakes and the evidence of having lived.

If something is good and universally acknowledged to be so, this is not reason enough to dislike it.

I chanced upon "The Luck of Roaring Camp" again a couple of years ago and I cried so much you'll find that my Dover Thrift Edition is waterlogged. Methinks I have grown soft in my middle age. 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.

I missed her like a reflex, even though I knew that it was just some trick of my undependable brain. Some stupid, vestigial part. The way humans have appendixes, even though they're pointless and mainly just a pain in the butt and people never even think about them unless they have to have them removed.

I am so tired of your crap. Do you honestly think you suffer more than everyone else? Do you think you suffer more than I do? Do you think you're the first person to ever have a baby? Or lose someone? Do you think you're some goddamned pioneer when it comes to grief?"

Sadie shifted forward, and he could feel the momentum in their argument. He could feel the cruel thing she was about to say in response to the cruel thing he had said. But the cruel thing did not arrive. Disturbingly, she slumped forward, and started to weep.

He watched her, but he did not go over to her. "Snap out of it, Sadie. Come to the office. We work through our pain. That's what we do. We put the pain into the work, and the work becomes better. But you have to participate. You have to talk to me. You can't ignore me and our company and everything that came before.

...it is not an inevitability that we should be our worst selves behind the mask of an avatar. What I believe to my very core is that virtual worlds can be better than the actual world. They can be more moral, more just, more progressive, more empathetic, and more accommodating of difference. And if they can be, shouldn't they be?

You have had tragedy, yes, but you have had many good friends as well.
"Have I?"
"Yes, Marx and Sadie. They loved you."
"Is two considered many?" Sam asked.
"It depends on how good the friendships are,"
Dong Hyun said.

When you have children, you'll never be able to worry about a friend as much again," Dov said.

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.

art doesn't typically get made by happy people.

Maya has chosen to be ring bearer because the job has more responsibility than flower girl. "If you lose a flower, you get another flower," Maya reasons. "If you lose the ring, everyone is sad forever. The ring bearer has much more power."

"You sound like Gollum," A.J. says.

"Who's Gollum?" Maya wants to know.

"Someone very nerdy that your father likes," Amelia says.

Why'd you give him all that stuff after he tried to rob me?"

"Because he was less fortunate than us, Natty. And Daddy always said that we have to be mindful of those who are less fortunate."

"But Daddy killed people, didn't he?"

"Yes," I admitted. "Daddy was complex.