Quotes from Gabrielle Zevin

When you think of your mother, the word that occurs to you is too. She hugs you too hard, kisses you too long, asks you too many questions, worries too much about your weight/your love life/your friendships/your future/your water consumption. She loves you with an almost religious fervor. She loves you too much. The love makes you feel embarrassed for her and almost guilty—other than be born, what have you done to deserve such love?

But then again, maybe 'I will' is nicer. It has the future in it. 'I do' just has the present.

You know very well that I was in Germany as a child, and you have heard the stories, so I won't tell them to you again. But I can tell you that the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend." "I hadn't thought of it that way," Sadie said. Freda stroked Sadie's hand. "Mine Sadie. This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.

Maybe the sex wouldn't have been exceptional, but it wouldn't have mattered. Because the other things they had were finer than sex. Because he loved Sadie. It was one of only a handful of things that he knew to be a constant about himself. The greatest pleasures of his life had been when he was by her side, playing or inventing.

how quickly the world could shift. How your sense of self could change depending on your location.

He was happiest when he did not have to think about his body--when he could forget that he had a body at all.

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

The second man I meet is Andrew, and he has dirty fingernails so I can't notice if he is nice or not. I can even eat my brown sugar and butter crêpes because, oy gevalt , I'm so distracted by these fingernails. I mean, what was he doing before he came on this date? Competitive gardening? Burying the last woman he dated?

What a world. People once made glass sculptures of decay, and they put these sculptures in museums. How strange and beautiful human beings are. And how fragile.

How quickly you go from being the youngest to the oldest person in a room, she thought.

He smelled like smoke and laundered sheets left to dry in the sun.

Imagine getting to be one of those people who actually gets paid to talk about literature. He'd do this for free, not that he wants his publisher to know that.

Isn't that the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.

I don't think you can really run away from things. They tend to follow you" -Anya

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

I'm always seeing the world with magic eyes," he said. "I'm exploding with childish wonder.

It was superior, he believed, to show love to 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.

A.J. watches Maya in her pink party dress, and he feels a vaguely familiar, slightly intolerable bubbling inside of him. He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at least carbonated. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it's love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother.

I've been a police officer for twenty years now and I'll tell you, pretty much every bad thing in life is a result of bad timing, and every good thing is the result of good timing.

Zweisamkeit' is the feeling of being alone even when you're with other people.

You are a gaming person, which is to say you are the kind of person who believes that "game over" is a construction. The game is only over if you stop playing. There is always one more life. Even the most brutal death isn't final.

What if I had told the boy I loved to leave and it ended up being for nothing?

I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires.

Alice would only have to be in the hospital for two nights this time, and it was only out of, according to her mother, "an abundance of caution." It reminded her of a murder of crows, a flock of seagulls, a pack of wolves. She imagined that "caution" was a creature of some kind -- maybe, a cross between a Saint Bernard and an elephant. A large, intelligent, friendly animal that could be counted on to defend the Green sisters from threats, existential and otherwise.