Quotes from Gabrielle Zevin

On some level, I think we want our reading self to represent our best self.

I'm in the middle of a 25-city book tour, and I like watching what people buy in bookstores. I see people buy books that I strongly suspect they will never read, and as an author, I must tell you, I don't mind this one bit. We buy books aspirationally.

Intimacy doesn't have all that much to do with backseats of cars. Real intimacy is brushing your teeth together.

No one actually needs another person or another person's love to survive. Love is when we have irrationally convinced ourselves that we do.

Why do two people fall in love? It's a mystery.

I think you can do a lot, like describing people with their physical characteristics, things like that, but to me, I've always found it to be a much more informative question to ask somebody what they read.

The truth is, sometimes too much can happen in a relationship, and then there's nothing anyone can do or say. It's broken.

But I wondered if all this kissing was a bad habit with him and me. The thing we did with our mouths instead of talking.

It is a lie that people who love each other must know everything about each other. Love must occasionally allow for a gap.

The only love she inspires is the canine kind.

The scent is sweet and meloncholy. A bit like dying, a bit like falling in love.

The casualities seemed to go on and on. Just when I thought I was done losing her, I would find yet another way to love her all over again.

There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backwards, she thinks. She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had.

He told me that love was the only thing that really mattered in the world.

A question I've thought about a great deal is why it is so much easier to write about the things we dislike/hate/acknowledge to be flawed than the things we love.

Daddy always said the only thing worth begging for was your life, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe sometimes your love is a little bit worth begging for, too.

I'm like a unicorn; I'm a midlist writer who hasn't done anything else but write. But because I wasn't amazingly famous, I didn't become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan Franzen or a Joshua Ferris.

Sam's doctor said to him, "The good news is that the pain is in your head." But I am in my head, Sam thought.

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.

If you're always aiming for perfection, you won't make anything at all.

This is what time travel is. It's looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.

The words you can't find, you borrow. We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone.

But it is worth noting that to be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.

Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again.