Quotes from Gabrielle Zevin

Everything worth loving in this world is difficult.

He had an appreciation for things other people had forgotten.

There are people like you and like me. We have bad things happen to us, and we survive them. We are sturdy. But with people like your friend, you must be exceptionally gentle, or they may break.

Babies move more than books and aren't as conveniently shaped.

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

You call your mother. You're in a panic, but as soon as your mother answers the phone, you relax. When your mother is worrying about something, it means that you won't have to.

Turns out I really like bookstores. You know, I meet a lot of people in my line of work. A lot of folks pass through Alice Island, especially in the summer. I've seen movie people on vacation and I've seen music people and newspeople, too. There ain't nobody in the world like book people. It's a business of gentlemen and gentlewoman.

You would think women would want to stick together when there weren't that many of them, but they never did. It was as if being a woman was a disease that you didn't wish to catch. As long as you didn't associate with the other women, you could imply to the majority, the men: I'm not like those other ones.

If someone tells you there will be trouble, believe them.

True conviction is believing something to be right even after it becomes disadvantageous to you.

He felt comfortable and broken-in like favourite jeans.

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

She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person's death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI

Every generation spins the wheel,Anya, and where it lands defines 'the good'. Funny thing is they never know that they're spining it, and it hits something different every time.

A truly magnificent thing about the way the brain was coded, Sam thought, was that it could say "Excuse me" while meaning "Screw you.

With equal intensity, she feared her New York life was the best of all possible worlds, and that once she left New York, the gates would come down and lock, and she'd be too feeble and parochial to ever be allowed to return.

There are no ghost, but up here"--she gestured to her head--"it's a haunted house.

It began with a coin toss. The coin came up tails; I was heads.

Amelia the bright-sider believes it is better to be alone than to be with someone who doesn't share your sensibilities and interests. (It is, right?) Her mother likes to say that novels have ruined Amelia for real men.

Art doesn't typically get made by happy people.

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.

You love being Ruby's mother, but loving Ruby does not stop you from wanting things for yourself.

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.

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