Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

"What were you like," I asked her. "we're you happy? Or were you smiling because they told you to?"

Every time I run into you for the rest of our lives, I'll ask you to make a game with me. There's some groove in my brain that insists it is a good idea."
"Isn't that the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result."
"That's a game character's life, too," Sam said. "The world of infinite restarts. Start again at the beginning, this time you might win. And it's not as if all our results were bad. I love the things we made. We were a great team."
Sam offered Sadie his hand, and she shook it. She pulled him into her, and she kissed Sam on the cheek. "I love you, Sadie," Sam said.
"I know, Sam. I love you, too.

Most people's problems would be solved if they would only give more things a chance.

This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.

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.

Zweisamkeit' is the feeling of being alone even when you're with other people." Simon turned to look in his husband's eyes. "Before I met you, I felt this constantly. I felt it with my family, my friends, and every boyfriend I ever had. I felt it so often that I thought this was the nature of living. To be alive was to accept that you were fundamentally alone." Simon's eyes were moist. "I know I'm impossible, and I know you don't care about German words or marriage. All I can say is, I love you and thank you for marrying me anyway.

Friendship," Marx said, "is kind of like having a Tamagotchi.

A question I've thought about a great deal is why it is so much easier to write about the things we dislike/hate/acknowledge to be flawed than the things we love.

For the longest time after that, neither of us said anything. I was unaccustomed to his silence, but I didn't mind it. I knew near everything about him, and he knew near everything about me, and all that made our quiet a kind of song. The kind you hum without even knowing what it is or why you're humming it. The kind that you've always known.

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.

Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?

There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backwards, she thinks. She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had.

Ask two people to tell you anything, you'll get two versions. Even easy things like directions, let alone important or semi-controversial topics like why a fight started or what a person was generally like. If you don't know something for yourself, you just can't be sure.

The difficulty of living alone is that any mess he makes he is forced to clean up himself.

No, the real difficulty of living alone is that no one cares if you are upset.

To build a world for someone seems a romantic thing from where I stand." Dov shook his head. "Sam Masur, that fucked-up, romantic kid.