Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

There's the tree with the branches that everyone sees, and then there's the upside-down root tree, growing the opposite way. So Earth is the branches, growing in opposing but perfect symmetry. The branches don't think much about the roots, and maybe the roots don't think much about the branches, but all the time, they're connected by the trunk, you know?
Gabrielle Zevin
There are many challenges to long distance running, but one of the greatest is the question of where to put on's house keys.
Gabrielle Zevin
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?
Gabrielle Zevin
It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him. Apparently I could.
Gabrielle Zevin
A.J. watches Maya in her pink party dress, and he feels a vaguely familiar, slightly intolerable bubbling inside of him. He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at least carbonated. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it's love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother.
Gabrielle Zevin
I did learn something about insanity while I was down there. People go crazy, not because they are crazy, but because it's the best available option at the time.
Gabrielle Zevin
Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.
Gabrielle Zevin
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.
Gabrielle Zevin
Did you know that there are over three hundred words for love in canine?
Gabrielle Zevin
Tragedy is when someone ends up dead.Everything else is just a bump in the road.
Gabrielle Zevin
Tragedy is when someone ends up dead. Everything else is just a bump in the road. For the record, that was something Daddy used to say.
Gabrielle Zevin
Theo looked at me with his smoldering Jesus eyes, and the Catholic schoolgirl in me crossed her legs.
Gabrielle Zevin
I am the proud owner of several complexes. But who isn’t? When you think about it, isn’t a person just a structure built in reaction to the landscape and the weather?
Gabrielle Zevin
On the board, Mr. Beery had written "Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it." I wasn't sure if this was meant to be inspirational, thematic, or a joke about making sure to study.
Gabrielle Zevin
Each period had required me to be a slightly different person, and that was exhausting. I wondered if school had always felt this way and whether it was like this for everone.
Gabrielle Zevin
No one will ever love me that much again.
Gabrielle Zevin
I was just thinking... isn't it lucky that we decided to become co-editors? If one takes a blow to the head, the other can fill in. If the other's lung spontaneoulsy collapses, the one can fill in. It's a perfect system once you think about it."~Will Landsman
Gabrielle Zevin
What if I had told the boy I loved to leave and it ended up being for nothing?
Gabrielle Zevin
We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.
Gabrielle Zevin
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.
Gabrielle Zevin
Can I ask you something?" you said. "How did you ever survive that scandal?"She said, "I refused to be shamed.""How did you do that?" you asked. "When they came at me, I kept coming," she said.
Gabrielle Zevin
Everything worth loving in this world is difficult.
Gabrielle Zevin
The easiest way to get old is to be technologically behind...
Gabrielle Zevin
She doesn't recognize the number—none of her friends use their phones as phones anymore.
Gabrielle Zevin
Hi there," squeaked a precocious little voice, "you are speaking to Chloe Fusakawa, and I have just learned how to answer the phone.
Gabrielle Zevin
But I wondered if all this kissing was a bad habit with him and me. The thing we did with our mouths instead of talking.
Gabrielle Zevin
Daddy used to say that calling a person a romantic was just another way of saying he or she acted without regard for conseqences.
Gabrielle Zevin
You don't choose a book the book chooses you
Gabrielle Zevin
I do not believe in God. I have no religion. But this to me is as close to a church as I have known in this life. It is a holy place. With bookstores like this, I feel confident in saying that there will be a book business for a very long time.
Gabrielle Zevin
But now, at this moment, you can't hook your boat to mine, 'cause I'm liable to sink us both. (222)
Gabrielle Zevin
My heart was a little bit broken, but I still had to go to school. I buttoned my dress shirt over it and my winter coat, too. I hoped it didn't show too much.
Gabrielle Zevin
I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.
Gabrielle Zevin
...lies can sound awfully pretty when a girl is in love with the person telling them.
Gabrielle Zevin
That spring, Amelia takes Maya to the drugstore and lets her choose any polish color she likes. "How do you pick?" Maya says. "Sometimes I ask myself how I'm feeling," Amelia says. "Sometimes I ask myself how I'd like to be feeling.
Gabrielle Zevin
In truth, she hadn't put much thought into whether she was happy before. She supposes that since she never thought about it, she must have been happy. People who are happy don't really need to ask themselves if they are happy or not, do they? They just are happy, she thinks.
Gabrielle Zevin
Above all, mine is a love story. Unlike most love stories, this one involves chance, gravity, a dash of head trauma. It began with a coin toss. The coin came up tails. I was heads. Had it gone my way, there might not be a story at all. Just a chapter, or a sentence in a book whose greater theme had yet to be determined. Maybe this chapter would've had the faintest whisper of love about it. But maybe not. Sometimes, a girl needs to lose.
Gabrielle Zevin
But I loved those books or at least that first one. And I felt somewhere down deep inside him the person who wrote it must be there. That you couldn't write such beautiful things and have such an ugly heart. But that is the truth. He was a beautiful writer and a terrible person.
Gabrielle Zevin
Despite the fact that he loves books and owns a bookstore, A.J. does not particularly care for writers. He finds them to be unkempt, narcissistic, silly, and generally unpleasant people. He tries to avoid the ones who've written books he loves for fear that they will ruin their books for him.
Gabrielle Zevin
Wounds are like water set to boil – they heal best left unwatched...
Gabrielle Zevin
Every book is a world.
Gabrielle Zevin
That Woman is in love with her own grief.
Gabrielle Zevin
It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.
Gabrielle Zevin
I know he's a good person. And he said he was sorry. And I love him. And when you love a person, you have to forgive him sometimes.
Gabrielle Zevin
The words you can't find, you borrow.
Gabrielle Zevin
Every word the right one and exactly where it should be. That's basically the highest compliment I can give.
Gabrielle Zevin
My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.
Gabrielle Zevin
Since i couldn't remember the "real" first time i'd lost my virginity, this would have become my de facto first time. I wanted a better story then: I did it with this boy who i wasn't very into and who had mysterious Gaterade breath; in his room decorated with sports equipment; at least he was nice enough to provide condoms and get his ancient, horny dog to leave us along.
Gabrielle Zevin
It was funny how dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or the other. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
Gabrielle Zevin
His heart is too full, and no words to release it.
Gabrielle Zevin
They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.
Gabrielle Zevin
But then again, maybe 'I will' is nicer. It has the future in it. 'I do' just has the present.
Gabrielle Zevin
Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you're the only person in the room.
Gabrielle Zevin
Why are you crying?""I was reading.
Gabrielle Zevin
It was odd to have something so personal out there in that way, but the good thing about art is that no one necessarily knows what you mean by it anyway.
Gabrielle Zevin
All women are many women! I'm afraid you've never known very much about women.
Gabrielle Zevin
People are capable of great, great change during the span of one lifetime. And women even more than men.
Gabrielle Zevin
And then, despite the fact that A. J. does not believe in God, he closes his eyes and thanks whomever, the higher power, with all his porcupine heart.
Gabrielle Zevin
A place is not really a place without a bookstore.
Gabrielle Zevin
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 mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children's books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred 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.
Gabrielle Zevin
When I was in my twenties and broke, I'd buy books before food. A meal will sustain you for a few hours, a good book will sustain you for life.
Gabrielle Zevin