Quotes from Gabrielle Zevin

Time was mathematically explicable; it was the heart—the part of the brain represented by the heart—that was the mystery.

They say success kills relationships, but the lack of it will do it just as quickly.

You can either be a bystander who lives his life in reaction to the decisions that others make, or you can be the leader who is making those decisions.

the things we don't have are sadder than the things we have. Because the things we don't have exist in our imaginations, where they are perfect.

What was a gate anyway? A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.

A programmer is a diviner of possible outcomes, and a seer of unseen worlds.

For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I Love You. It was superior, he believed, to show love those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn't you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.

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

There is a time for any fledgling artist where one's tastes exceed one's abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

If your last words are somehow meant to encapsulate your entire existence, Liz finds um strangely appropriate. Um means nothing. Um is what you say while you're thinking of what you'll really say. Um suggests someone interrupted before they'd begun. Um is a fifteen-year-old girl who gets hit by a taxicab in front of a mall on the way to help pick out a prom dress for a prom she isn't even going to, for God's sake.

Oh, all stories are the same, aren't they? Men and women fall in love or out of love. People are born; people die. It al ends happily or it all ends sadly, and the difference matters only to the people involved.

People are capable of great, great change during the span of one lifetime. And women even more than men.

It has meaning to me. And the longer I do this (bookselling, yes, of course, but also living if that isn't too awfully sentimental), the more I believe that this is what the point of it all is. To connect, my dear little nerd. Only connect.

Maybe we'll meet again, when we are slightly older and our minds less hectic, and I'll be right for you and you'll be right for me. But right now, I am chaos to your thoughts and you are poison to my heart.

It's a tragic fact to die in an accident

Teachers assign it, and parents are happy because their kids are reading something of 'quality.' But it's forcing kids to read books like that that make them think they hate reading.

Video games don't make people violent, but maybe they falsely give you the idea that you can be a hero.

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

Is a twist less satisfying if you know it's coming? Is a twist that you can't predict symptomatic of bad construction? These are things to consider when writing.

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?

Anticipating the worst doesn't provide insurance from the worst happening," Mimmy says.

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

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.

To be alive was to accept that your were fundamentally alone.