Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

She takes out her phone and snaps a picture. "I like to take pictures of my drinks."
"They're like family," A.J. says.
"They're better than family.

Maya knows that her mother left her in Island Books. But maybe that's what happens to all children at a certain age. Some children are left in shoe stores. And some children are left in toy stores. And some children are left in sandwich shops. And your whole life is determined by what store you get left in. She does not want to live in the sandwich shop.

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.

Does it count for anything that I just told you I love you?" Gable asked.
I considered this briefly before deciding that it didn't. "Not really. Not when I know you don't mean it.

A good marriage is, at least, one part conspiracy.

Her diaper is soiled. A.J. has never changed a diaper in his life, though he is a modestly skilled gift wrapper. Back when Nic was alive, Island used to offer free gift wrap at Christmas, and he figures that diaper changing and gift-wrapping must be related proficiencies.

My dad always says to listen for the pauses when you want to know if someone's hiding something.

A.J. several Google searches to determine bathing protocol: appropriate temperature bath water two-year-old; can a two-year-old use grown-up shampoo?; how does a father go about cleaning a two-year-old girl's private parts without being a pervert?; how high to fill tub - toddler; how to prevent a two-year-old from accidentally drowning in tub; general rules for bath safety, and so on.

A place is not really a place without a bookstore.

Stop saying that! You sound absurd, and I don't even think you mean it. Besides, I'd never marry you," I told him. "I'm sixteen, and you're a slut, and you can't stop saying preposterous things!"
"True," he admitted. He kissed me on the lips and then I closed the door.

There's a strange sort of quiet when you're dying. It's as if you're in a glass room, and the walls keep getting thicker and thicker.

Remember: you are as good as you are tomorrow.

I worry for you. If you love everyone, you'll end up having hurt feelings most of the time. I suppose, relative to the length of your life, you feel as if you've known me a rather long time. Your perspective of time is really very warped, Maya. But I am old and soon, you'll forget you even knew me.

The Catholic schoolgirl in me was scandalized by the thought; I told her we'd been thrown out of Catholic school so she should shut up.

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.

She is seventy, and she believes you try new things or you may as well die.

No, I've been doing this myself forever. I could have gone in here myself, but my daddy doesn't want me to get raped. That happens all the time in bathrooms.

To begin, it is narrated by Death!

Why are you here?" I asked him.
"That's an awfully big question, Anya."
"No, I meant here outside this office. What did you do wrong?"
"Multiple choice," he said. "(a) A few pointed comments I made in Theology. (b) Headmaster wants to have a chat with the new kid about wearing hats in school. (c) My schedule. I'm just too darn smart for my classes. (d) My eyewitness account of the girl who poured lasagna over her boyfriend's head. (e.) Headmaster's leaving her husband and wants to run away with me. (f) None of the above. (g) All of the above."
"Ex-boyfriend," I mumbled.
"Good to know," he said.

I missed her like a reflex, even though I knew that it was just some trick of my undependable brain. Some stupid, vestigial part. The way humans have appendixes, even though they're pointless and mainly just a pain in the butt and people never even think about them unless they have to have them removed.

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.

From Nic's point of view, her older sister had been a primer on how not to live her life.

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.

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.

But you, you can never do anything hard. And I let you be that way.

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.

How long will I be in here?" I asked.
"Varies," said the guard as he closed the door and locked me in. "Usually until Mrs. Cobrawick thinks you learned your lesson. I hate this job. Try not to lose your mind, girl."
Those were the last words spoken to me for a very long time.
The guard had given me good advice, which turned out to be nearly impossible to follow.

Beauties" by Anton Chekhov, "The Doll's House" by Katherine Mansfield, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J. D. Salinger, "Brownies" or "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" both by ZZ Packer, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel, "Fat" by Raymond Carver, "Indian Camp

It was such a sweet, sad song with such sweet, sad lyrics. Old-fashioned a little, but also timeless.

I wish I could tell you to always follow your heart, but I think it is bad advice. You have a heart, yes, it is true, but also a brain and also a soul. I've come to believe that we love with our brains as much as our hearts. Real Love is not just instinct, but intent ... From year to year, you may not always be the same Jane. This is perfectly normal. A Jane is many Janes in a lifetime.

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

He had referred to blurbs as the blood diamonds of publishing.

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.

You wouldn't be abandoning me if you stopped to get a Band-Aid, you know.

It had not been a lonely childhood, though many of her intimates had been somewhat less than real.

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.

Good morning, magazines! Good morning, bookmarks! Good morning, books!

Showing up is what counts.

A.J. decides to call Lambiase. He suggests frozen shrimp from Costco, which A.J. now recognizes as Lambiase's default party-throwing suggestion.

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.

I thought of summer as the living time; the rest of the year was the backward time, the writing time

Maya, we are what we love. We are that we love.

He's in the military, serving overseas in Afghanistan."
"Well done. You're marrying an American hero," A.J. says.
"I guess I am."
"I hate those guys," he says. "They make me feel totally inadequate. Tell me something shitty about him so that I feel better.

I can't keep a baby," A.J. says firmly. "I haven't slept in two nights. She's a terrorist! She wakes up at, like, insane times. Three forty-five in the morning seems to be when her day begins. I live alone. I'm poor. You can't raise a baby on books alone.

Dad. What a word. What a little big word. What a word and what a world! He is crying. His heart is too full, and no words to release it. I know what words do, he thinks. They let us feel less. "No,

We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone.

If you didn't let some things go, you'd spend your whole life fighting.

You're a snob, you know that? Makes you miss out on a lot." "I've

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

How long does a dream have to last before it's just life?

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

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.

There ain't nobody in the world like book people. It's a business of gentlemen and gentlewomen.

She hasn't cried once. SHe doesn't understand that Margaret is dead. At that age, they can't fully understand the concept of death. It's a good thing really.
Jane fully understood the concept of death and she felt truly injured that Aunt Bess considered her unmoved. Jane thought it should be perfectly clear to everyone that rearranging the furniture in her dollhouse was her expression of grief. She had been moving the Mother Doll (it was a nuclear family of dolls that consisted of a mother, a father, a boy, and a girl) and all the Mother Doll's possessions into the dollhouse's attic. Jane wondered why tears were considered a superior form of grief to the rearrangement of one's dollhouse.
Feeling terribly misunderstood, Jane began to cry.
Oh listen, said Aunt Bess, she begins to understand.

It's a well-known fact that hate shows up on your face once you're forty.

People knowing your private business gave them power over you -Anya

I hate book parties," A.J. says. "But you run the bookstore," Lambiase says. "It's a problem," A.J. admits.

In a way, publishing in 2005 was similar to publishing in 1950. Nobody kept blogs; that was still optional. I didn't even have a website then.

I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful - nonfiction only, please.

Violence should not always beget more violence.

He had an appreciation for things other people had forgotten

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.

Did you have a ship?" Maya asks. "Yes. It had books on it, and it really was more of a research vessel. We studied a lot." "You're ruining this story." "It's a fact, Maya. There are murdering kinds of pirates and researching kinds of pirates, and your daddy was the latter.

In the future, he will rethink his unlocked-door policy. Though it had occurred to him that something might be stolen, he had never considered the possibility that something might be left.

You know this girl.
Her hair is neither long nor short nor light nor dark. She parts it precisely in the middle.
She sits precisely in the middle of the classroom, and when she used to ride the school bus, she sat precisely in the middle of that, too.
She joins clubs, but is never the president of them. Sometimes she is the secretary; usually, just a member. When asked, she has been known to paints sets for the school play.
She always has a date to the dance, but is never anyone's first choice. In point of fact, she's nobody's first choice for anything. Her best friend became her best friend when another girl moved away.
She has a group of girls she eats lunch with every day, but God, how they bore her. Sometimes, when she can't stand it anymore, she eats in the library instead. Truth be told, she prefers books to people, and the librarian always seems happy to see her.
She knows there are other people who have it worse - she isn't poor or ugly or friendless or teased. Of course, she's also aware that the reason no one teases is because no one ever notices her.
This isn't to say she doesn't have qualities.
She is pretty, maybe, if anyone would bother to look. And she gets good enough grades. And she doesn't drink and drive. And she says NO to drugs. And she is always where she says she will be. And she calls when she's going to be late. And she feels a little, just a little, dead inside.
She thinks, You think you know me, but you d

Imagine getting to be one of those people who actually gets paid to talk about literature.

She could remember the sensation of flying through the air, which seemed to last an eternity. She could remember feeling reckless, happy, and doomed, all at the same time. She could remember thinking, I am above gravity.

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.

Maya has chosen to be ring bearer because the job has more responsibility than flower girl. "If you lose a flower, you get another flower," Maya reasons. "If you lose the ring, everyone is sad forever. The ring bearer has much more power."
"You sound like Gollum," A.J. says.
"Who's Gollum?" Maya wants to know.
"Someone very nerdy that your father likes," Amelia says.

Reaction speaks to the necessity of encountering stories at precisely the right time in our lives.

The theme of the dance was "Great Romances," or some such nonsense. There were projections of supposedly great couples from the past on the walls of the gym. Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Hermione and Ron, Bonnie and Clyde, etc.

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

And how rare is it to find someone who shares your tastes? The one real fight they'd ever had was over David Foster Wallace. It was around the time of Wallace's suicide. A.J. had found the reverent tone of the eulogies to be insufferable. The man had written a decent (if indulgent and overlong) novel, a few modestly insightful essays, and not much else. "Infinite Jest is a masterpiece," Harvey had said. "Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life," A.J. had countered. "Style, no substance, my friend." Harvey's face had reddened as he leaned over the desk. "You say that about any writer who was born in the same decade as you!

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

For the record, everything new is not worse than everything old.

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.

Novels certainly have their charms, but the most elegant creation in the prose universe is a short story.

Sorry, Maya, but it wasn't exactly a pleasure cruise for me either. The quicker you stop shitting yourself, the quicker we don't have to do this.

There's something kind of heroic about being a bookseller.

You made quite an impression on the old man, by the way."
"You mean Uncle Yuri?"
"He said he'd marry you. If you weren't related. And if he were fifty years younger. Et cetera. Et cetera."
"That a lot of very important 'ifs', Jacks.

Yes, I read it," she replies. "I most certainly did read it. It kept me up all night, I was so angry with it. At this stage of my life, I would rather not be kept up all night. Nor do I wish to have my tears jerked at the rate at which this novel jerked them. The next time you recommend a book to me, I hope you'll keep that in mind, Mr. Fikry." "I will," he says. "And I do apologize, Mrs. Cumberbatch. Most of our customers have rather liked The Book Thief.

But jackets are the redheaded stepchildren of book publishing. We blame them for everything.

The heart is so peculiar. How light and how heavy it can feel at the same time.
How light.

In a way, whoever you know in a certain place defines that place for you.

I've made room for you, she said. if you want it, there's room.

Eye contact made people think you were being truthful even if you weren't.

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

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.

I loathe collectible books anyway. People getting all moony over particular paper carcasses. It's the ideas that matter, man. The words,

Life is messy. Deal with it. If you're judging it, you're not really seeing it -Dr. Lau

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.

They were an indistinct blur of pastel and white uniforms, like chalk doodles on a sidewalk in the rain

It is time for you to set your house in order.

You can't avoid orphan stories, child. Every story is an orphan story. We are all orphaned sooner or later.

Though he can't remember how he got there or having taken off his clothes, A.J. wakes in bed wearing only his underwear. He remembers that Harvey Rhodes is dead; he remembers being an asshole to the comely Knightley Press rep; he remembers throwing the vindaloo across the room; he remembers the first glass of wine and the toast to Tamerlane. After that, oblivion. From his point of view, the evening had been a triumph.

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.

Isn't that about an orphan?" I asked. I hated those kinds of books.
"You can't avoid orphan stories, child. Every story is an orphaned story. Life is an orphan story. We are all orphaned sooner or later."
"In my case, sooner."
"Yes, in your case, sooner. But you are strong, and God never gives us more than we can bear.

It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us," the passage goes, "but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down a road. And someday, you do not know when, he, or indeed she, will be there. You will be loved because for the first time in your life, you will truly not be alone. You will have chosen to not be alone.

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.

Theo nodded slowly. "You love Balanchine chocolate like I love cacao."
"I wouldn't say love, Theo."
"No, you speak the truth. Love isn't right. It isn't right for me either. Sometimes I hate cacao." Theo looked at me. "You don't love Balanchine chocolate. You are Balanchine chocolate.