Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

Theo looked at me with his smoldering Jesus eyes, and the Catholic schoolgirl in me crossed her legs.

...an irresistible of why we read and why we love.We are not quite novels.We are not quite short stories.In the end, we are collected works.

If this were a novel, I'd stop reading right now. I'd throw it across the room.

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.

I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart.

Every book is a world.

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.

...lies can sound awfully pretty when a girl is in love with the person telling them.

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

You forget all of it anyway. First, you forget everything you learned-the dates of the Hay-Herran Treaty and Pythagorean Theorem. You especially forget everything you didn't really learn, but just memorized the night before. You forget the names of all but one or two of your teachers, and eventually you'll forget those, too. You forget your junior class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend's home phone number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times. For me, it was something by Simon & Garfunkel. Who knows what it will be for you? And eventually, but slowly, oh so slowly, you forget your humiliations-even the ones that seemed indelible just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. Who went to a good college. Who threw the best parties Who could get you pot. 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.

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.

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.

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.

That Woman is in love with her own grief.

The words you can't find, you borrow.

In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know. For everyone else, it's just another end.

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.

You don't choose a book the book chooses you

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.

It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him. Apparently I could.

Death is a state of mind---many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.

There's a pleasure to loving someone even when you know there's no chance in them loving you back. The pain I felt let me know I was still alive.

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.

Why are you crying?""I was reading.

A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.

Love stories are written in millimeters and milliseconds with a fast, dull pencil whose marks you can barely see, they are written in miles and eons with a chisel on the side of a mountiantop

Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you're the only person in the room.

She doesn't recognize the number—none of her friends use their phones as phones anymore.

There's a difference between being alive and living.

Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.

They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.

They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?

I wondered if the person who really loves you is the person who knows all your stories, the person who WANTS to know all your stories.

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.

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.

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?

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.

My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.

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.

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?

There are many challenges to long distance running, but one of the greatest is the question of where to put on's house keys.

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.

Wounds are like water set to boil – they heal best left unwatched...

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.

I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.

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.

All of these teeth had once been in real, live people. They had talked and smiled and eaten and sang and cursed and prayed. They had brushed and flossed and died. In English class, we read poems about death, but here, right in front of me was a poem about death too.

No one will ever love me that much again.

Everything worth loving in this world is difficult.

Hi there," squeaked a precocious little voice, "you are speaking to Chloe Fusakawa, and I have just learned how to answer the phone.

A place is not really a place without a bookstore.

His heart is too full, and no words to release it.

What if I had told the boy I loved to leave and it ended up being for nothing?

Every word the right one and exactly where it should be. That's basically the highest compliment I can give.

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.

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.

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

But then again, maybe 'I will' is nicer. It has the future in it. 'I do' just has the present.

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.

Saying you're through with romance is like saying you're done with living, Betty. Life is better with a little romance, you know.