Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

On Earth, Liz was constantly occupied with studying and finding a college and a career and all those other things that the adults in her life deemed terribly important. Since she had died, everything she was doing on Earth had seemed entirely meaningless. From Liz's point of view, the question of what her life would be was now definitively answered. The story of her life is short and pointless: There once was a girl who got hit by a car and died. The end.

E. A. Poe defines a short story as readable in a single sitting. I imagine a “single sitting” was longer back in his day. But I digress again.

How about I tell you what I don't like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn't be - basically gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful - nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mashups a la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and cross breeding rarely results in anything satisfying... I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred and fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and - I imagine this goes without saying - vampires.

The day my father shook my hand, I knew I was a writer.

It's more than romantic. It's better than romance. It's friendship. Sam laughed. Who cares about romance anyway?

When she was forty, would she lament that she hadn't had sex with more people and partied more? But then, she didn't enjoy many people, and she had never gone to a party that she wasn't eager to leave. She hated being drunk, though she did enjoy smoking a joint every now and then. She liked playing games, seeing a foreign movie, a good meal. She liked going to bed early and waking up early. She liked working. She liked that she was good at her work, and she felt proud of the fact that she was well paid for it.

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.

Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.

I'm always seeing the world with magic eyes," he said. "I'm exploding with childish wonder.

He was skilled — — at the end of the level, he could make Mario land at the top of the flagpole, something Sadie had never mastered. Although Sadie liked to be the player, there was a pleasure to watching someone who was a dexterous player — -it was like watching a dance. He never looked over at her. He cleared the first boss battle, and the words BUT OUR PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE appeared on the screen.

But the best parts of him were in his books. I suppose I could always read those if I missed him too much. I haven't wanted to read one yet, though.

Her mother likes to say that novels have ruined Amelia for real men.

...she doesn't want to become the kind of person who thinks that good news can only come from calls one was already expecting and callers one already knows

You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They're the last to go. And then once you've forgotten enough, you love someone else.

Love you madly, my sweet friend. Love you madly. The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.