Quotes from Gabrielle Zevin

Throughout his life, Sam had hated being told to 'fight,' as if sickness were a character failing. Illness could not be defeated no matter how hard you fought, and pain, once it had you in its grasp, was transformational.

Janine smiles. "Strike the second sentence. Reader will know. Show, don't tell.

An "online presence" is "all the true things and all the lies about a person on the Internet.

You have a thousand chances to make something right. That's a heck of a lot of chances, by the way. But they do run out eventually.

I doubt that," I said. "I can argue with anything.

The problem with meeting new people is not that you might not like them, but that you will like them too much.

she'd felt old, but that night, she realized she wasn't old at all. You couldn't be old and still be wrong about as many things as she'd been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.

Tell me I don't know you, Sam thought. Tell me I don't know you when I could draw both sides of this hand, your hand from memory.

You're a builder of worlds, and if you're a builder of worlds, your feelings are not as important as what your gamers are feeling. You must imagine them at all times. There is no artist more empathetic than the game designer.

And as any mixed-race person will tell you — to be half of two things is to be a whole of nothing.

But the best thing Marx did for them was this: He believed in them.

Incidentally, you're not a baby because you have nightmares, Natty. Something terrible happened to you when you were little, and that's why you have them. It isn't your fault." "You never have them," she pointed out. "No, I go around pouring spaghetti sauce over boys' heads," I said. Natty laughed. "Good night, brave Anya.

What is a game?" Marx said. "It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.

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

They had become instant best friends in the way people can in their twenties.

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.

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.

There's a difference between being alive and living.

The store is fifteen Mayas wide and twenty Mayas long. She knows this because she once spent an afternoon measuring it by lying her body across the room. It is fortunate that it is not more than thirty Mayas long because that is as far as she could count on the day the measurements were taken.

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.

A.J. does not particularly care for writers. He finds them to be unkempt, narcissistic, silly, and generally unpleasant people. He tries to avoid meeting the ones who've written books he loves for fear that they will ruin their books for him.

It's more than romantic. It's better than romance. It's friendship." Sam laughed. "Who cares about romance anyway?

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.

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