Quotes from Gabrielle Zevin

Commander Keen, Myst, Doom, Diablo, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Leisure Suit Larry, The Colonel's Bequest, Ultima, Warcraft, Monkey Island, The Oregon Trail

Sadie," he said. "Do you know why I want to make a game?" "Of course. Because you foolishly think it will make you rich and famous." "No. It's very simple. I want to make something that will make people happy.

We are all living, at most, half of a life. 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.

How many times can you look at something and know that everyone around you is seeing the same thing or at the very least that their brains and eyes are responding to the same phenomenon? How much proof do you ever have that we're all in the same world?

The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both constant and a variable at the same time.

We walk back to town, and he looks at me seriously and he says, 'Sadie, when you tell this story, say I asked you at the glass flower exhibit. Don't say it was closed.' The myth, the narrative, whatever you want to call it, was always of supreme importance to Sam.

And in those days, girls like Sadie were conditioned to ignore the sexist generally, not just in gaming—it wasn't cool to point such things out. If you wanted to play with the boys, they couldn't be afraid of saying things around you.

That if she didn't know him, no one knew him, and he might as well not exist.

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.

Reading a great book.

The man who has no memory makes one out of paper.

While Sadie experienced this period of indecision as stressful, Sam didn't feel that way at all. The best part of this moment, he thought, is that everything is still possible.

Dov was a producer on Ichigo, and he was so well known that she worried that people would think her work was his work. That they wouldn't know where her work began and his work ended.

Will she be okay?" Sam said. "I think so," Anna said. It wasn't exactly a lie. She would be okay. Dead was okay. Sam nodded, but he had seen Anna in enough plays to know when she was lying, and he knew her well enough to know why she lied. When he lied, it was for the same reason: to protect her from that which she could not handle.

Love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.

A great textile, like the William Morris Strawberry Thief, is a piece of art, but it takes a lot of time to make a piece of art. It isn't simply design either. You have to understand the fabrics and what they can bear. You have to understand the dyeing process and how to achieve certain colors and what will make the color last through the ages. If you make a mistake, you might have to begin again.

From the window, she could see the water tower of the New England Confectionery Company's factory, which had recently been painted to resemble a roll of Necco wafers, those barely flavored, pastel-colored, vaguely religious-looking chalky disks. As they approached the factory, the air increasingly smelled of sugar, and the scent made Sadie nostalgic for a candy she had never even tasted.

With his sweet, roundish face, light-colored eyes, and mix of white and Asian features, Sam looked almost exactly like an anime character. Astro Boy, or one of the wisecracking little brothers of manga.

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.

She had resisted returning there [to Los Angeles, the city of her birth] because to return to one's home town felt like surrender.

Since she'd started teaching and become a mother, 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.

When she was forty, would she lament that she hadn't had sex with more people and partied more? But then, she didn't enjoy many people, and she had never gone to a party that she wasn't eager to leave. She hated being drunk, though she did enjoy smoking a joint every now and then. She liked playing games, seeing a foreign movie, a good meal. She liked going to bed early and waking up early.

She understood neither the conventions of Noh nor the language. Marx would occasionally whisper poetic, cryptic commentary into her ear: "The fisherman's ghost was killed for fishing in the wrong river." Or "The drum is silent, and the gardener is killing himself.

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.