Best quotes by Gabrielle Zevin

Someday, we’ll run into each other again, I know it. Maybe I’ll be older and smarter and just plain better. If that happens, that’s when I’ll deserve you. But now, at this moment, you can’t hook your boat to mine, because I’m liable to sink us both.

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.

I have so much paperwork. I'm afraid my paperwork has paperwork.

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

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

Diving is a leap of faith plus gravity.

We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works

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.

Did you know that there are over three hundred words for love in canine?

Daddy always said you only explained things to the people that actually mattered.

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.

Let's stay young forever. Young, stupid, and pretty. Sounds like a plan, don't you think?

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

Intimacy doesn't have all that much to do with backseats of cars. Real intimacy is brushing your teeth together.

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.

No one actually needs another person or another person's love to survive. Love is when we have irrationally convinced ourselves that we do.

I'm allergic to sad memories. It's the worst.

It's when you don't need something that you tend to lose it.

Chocolate doesn't solve everything, Nana." "It solves a whole heck of a lot, though.

A life isn't measured in hours or minutes. Its the quality not the length. All things considered I've been luckier than most. Almost sixteen years on Earth, and I've already had eight good ones here. I expect to have eight more before all's good said and done. Nearly thirty-two years total, and that's not too shabby

In you, I found infinity. In you, I was reborn

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

The scent is sweet and meloncholy. A bit like dying, a bit like falling in love.

If you are going to forgive a person, Liz decides, it is best to do it sooner rather than later. Later, Liz knows from experience, could be sooner than you thought.

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

I know you did, lass. You're the toughest girl I know." "'Lass'? Where did that come from?" "I don't know. I just felt the urge to call you that.

As many have discovered, it is entirely possible (although not particularly desirable) to love two people with all your heart. It is entirely possible to long for two lives, to feel that one life can't come close to containing it all.

It's sad when you think about it, but also kind of beautiful.

It wasn't even 8:00 yet. Pretty early for such deep thoughts.

It was a nice day, and I don't mean that it was sunny either. It was humid and not too cool, like winter was getting annoyed with itself and wanted it to be spring just as much as everyone else.

It is a lie that people who love each other must know everything about each other. Love must occasionally allow for a gap.

Daddy always said that an option that you know to have a bad outcome is only a fool's option, i.e., not an option at all. And I liked to think that Daddy hadn't raised a fool.

It's a tragic fact to die in an accident

Win walked over to me. He held out his palm. In the middle of it was a single black sequin from the dress Scarlet had lent me. "You lost this," he said. I giggled, slightly embarrassed to be leaving bits of myself behind. "I'm shedding.

My beautiful Win. I wanted to kiss him on every last broken place, but his mother and my lawyer were there. So, instead I started to cry.

Should have. Would have. Could have. Didn't.

You forget all of it anyway. . . You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. . . 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.

The baby, a girl, is born at 6:24 a.m. She weighs six pounds, ten ounces. The mother takes the baby in her arms and asks her, "Who are you, my little one?" And in response, this baby, who is Liz and not Liz at the same time, laughs.

Covers matter. In my experience, a different cover can make you think you're reading an entirely different book.

Speak up,' says Myrna who has a fuzzy white caterpillar of a moustache. 'My hearing's not so good.' 'I WAS SHOT IN THE HEAD.' Liz turns to Thandi. 'I thought you said you didn't remember how you got the hole in your head.' Thandi apologizes. 'I just remembered.' 'Shot in the head!' Florence-scratchy-voice says. 'Oy, that's rough.' 'Aw, it's nothing special. Happens pretty regularly where I'm from,' Thandi says. 'WHAT?' asks Myrna with the moustache. 'Say it toward my left ear, that's the good one.' 'I SAID, "IT'S NOTHING SPECIAL,"' Thandi yells/

Daddy always said the only thing worth begging for was your life, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe sometimes your love is a little bit worth begging for, too.

It's a weakness to apologize before hearing what the other person's grievances are. You don't want to end up creating new grievances where there were none to begin with. Another Daddy-ism, if you hadn't already guessed.

You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?

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

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

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

But I believe good things happen everyday. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that's life, isn't it?

We aren't the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.

The only love she inspires is the canine kind.

And when she dreams, she dreams of a girl who was lost at sea but one day found the shore.

People, you'll find, aren't usually all good or bad. Sometimes they're just a little bit good and a whole lot bad. And sometimes they're mostly good with a dash of bad. And most of us, well, we fall in the middle somewhere.

On, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human life is a beautiful mess.

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.

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 words you can't find, you borrow. 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. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart. We are not quite novels. The analogy he is looking for is almost there. We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that. In the end, we are collected works.

Well, for one, you have to remember not to scream. Once you have their attention, whispering is much more effective. Screaming ghosts scare people, you know

The casualities seemed to go on and on. Just when I thought I was done losing her, I would find yet another way to love her all over again.

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

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

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.

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.

Betty inhales sharply, 'It's just I thought I had lost you forever.' Oh, Betty, don't you know there's no such thing as forever?

On Elsewhere we fool ourselves into thinking we know what will be just because we know the amount of time we have left. We know this, but we never really know what will be. We never know what will happen.

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.

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.

A place isn't a place until it has a bookstore.

What are you reading?" Owen asks. "Charlotte's Web," Liz says. "It's really sad. One of the main characters just died." "You ought to read the book from end to beginning," Owen jokes. "That way, no one dies, and it's always a happy ending.

Sorry but nothing of much importance ever happened to me...I'm just a girl who forgot to look both ways before crossing the street.

Sometimes books don't find us until the right time.

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.

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.

if you were older you might agree with me. you might say that real love steals nothing. you might say that real love leaves a person intact. you would be wrong, jane. love is a greedy toddler who knows only the word 'mine.

Sometimes things seem so unbearable in the middle of the night, don't they? In the middle of the night, we're all such children.

When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.

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.