Quotes from Gabrielle Zevin

an aggressively male cologne, a roofie of a cologne.

When you figured out Sam's dead mother's name, you decided that it was fate, and from that day forward, Sam would be your brother. A name is destiny, if you think it is.

We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn't chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living.

How strange and beautiful human beings are. And how fragile.

The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own.

A good man is hard to find," she says finally. "Do you mean the O'Connor story? The one on your desk. It's an awfully dark thing to bring up at a time like this." "No, I mean you. I've been looking forever. It was only two trains and a boat away.

If Marx at twenty-two had a problem, it was that he was attracted to too many things and people.

Sam blew out 10 candles and in the distance Mary Lou Retton received a perfect 10 on her floor routine. And he almost felt like he, by blowing out the 10 candles at the precise moment that he had, had been what caused her to get the perfect 10. He fanaticized that the universe was a Rube Goldberg machine. If he had blown out only 9 candles, maybe the Romanian girl would have won instead.

One of the reasons they had become such good friends originally was because she had not insisted he tell his sad stories to satisfy her own curiosity. The least he could do was return the favor.

Exactly. I could save the princess, even when I could barely get out of bed. So, I do want to be rich and famous. I am, as you know, a bottomless pit of ambition and need. But I also want to make something sweet. Something kids like us would have wanted to play to forget their troubles for a while.

These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.

She liked going to bed early and waking up early. She liked working. She liked that she was good at her work, and she felt proud of the fact that she was well paid for it. She felt pleasure in orderly things—a perfectly efficient section of code, a closet where every item was in its place. She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable.

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

The mazes were for Sadie. To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.

You realize that, to the boy with the gun, it probably doesn't matter what particular "other" he is looking at. Or maybe he doesn't mistake Sam for Ant.

I am here with you, his body seemed to say, but I acknowledge that we are separate beings.

Torschlusspanik," Simon said. "Okay," Sam said. "I'll bite." "Don't encourage him," Ant said. "What's Torschlusspanik?" Sam said. "It means 'gate-shut panic,' " Simon said. "It's the fear that time is running out and that you're going to miss an opportunity. Literally, the gate is closing, and you'll never get in.

Sam's grandfather had two core beliefs: (1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken.

There is no purity in art.

She dates some - women and men. She has slipped into bisexuality without needing to make a big thing about it. She is seventy, and she believes you try new things or you may as well die.

In a world of planar surfaces, someone became 3D

The key to being a good thief, Sam always felt, was utter brazenness.

To return to the city of one's birth always felt like retreat.

But because he had been mostly raised in Asia, he had been completely sheltered from the kind of racism that Asians experienced in America.