Quotes from Gabrielle Zevin

And yet, in K-town, he felt more Korean than he ever had before. Or to put a finer point on it, he felt more aware of the fact that he was a Korean and that that was not necessarily a negative or even a neutral fact about him. The awareness gave him pause: perhaps a funny-looking mixed-race kid could exist at the center of the world, not just on its periphery.

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.

This is what time travel is. It's looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently.

The easiest way to get old is to be technologically behind

Whatever her sickness had been

Can't something be both?" Said said. "Friendship is friendship, and charity is charity." Freda said. "....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.

As he rounded Kennedy Street, he began to chant to himself a poem that he had heard once, he wasn't sure where. "That love is all there is; is all we know of love. It is enough; the freight should be proportioned to the groove.

Give Win back his hat," I told Natty. "It looks good on me," she said, batting her eyelashes. I took it off her head and handed it to Win. "Thanks for babysitting," I said. "Stop infantilizing me," Natty protested. "That's a very good word," Win commented. "Thank you," Natty replied. "I happen to know lots of them.

It gets more exciting," Imogen assured her. "You must be patient, Galina." "If it takes too long, I'll be dead," Nana replied.

Did you have a good time with Win?" Natty asked. "I'll tell you about it tomorrow." I lowered my voice. "He's still here." "Annie!" Her eyes grew wide and delighted. 'It's a long story and probably a lot less exciting than the one I suspect you're concocting, Natty. He's only using our couch.

Daedalus, I have found that the most intimate relationships allow for a great deal of privacy within them.

Sadie knew there was probably some message in this for her, but she couldn't be bothered to decipher it. It made her feel egomaniacal and ungenerous to think this way, but wasn't there always some game Sam was playing?

Alice was clever, but she had the kind of cleverness that verged on the unkind, and this had only gotten worse in the years since she had been diagnosed with leukemia. Sadie didn't want Sam viewed through her sister's acute and often unforgiving lens.

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

Sam was leaning on his good foot, in the increasingly lopsided way he had to stand, and Sadie felt a swelling of love and of worry for him — what was the difference in the end? It was never worth worrying about someone you didn't love. And it wasn't love if you didn't worry.

Nächstes Mal scheitern wir besser.

He felt that when Harvard had assigned them to be roommates, Sam had become his responsibility. So, he protected Sam, and he made the world a little easier for Sam, and it cost him next to nothing to do so. Marx's life had been filled with such abundance that he was one of those people who found it natural to care for those around him.

What's better than work?" He paused. "What's worse than work?

the reading, which had been about Chinese immigration to America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how Chinese immigrants had only been allowed to do certain kinds of work, like food or cleaning, and that's why there were so many Chinese restaurants and Chinese laundries, i.e., systemic racism.

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 good game, like Ichigo, was hard, but fair. The "unfair game" was life itself.

I love having sex with you," she says. "If you're a vegetable when this is done, can I still have sex with you?" she asks. "Sure," A.J. says. "And you won't think less of me?" "No." He pauses. "I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the turn this conversation has taken," he says.

As Sam often said to Sadie, "Why make anything if you don't believe it could be great?

A nostalgia for something that had never been? An envy at their intimacy? She wondered what it would have been like if Sam had been her lover.