Quotes from Gabrielle Zevin

A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.

I wondered if the person who really loves you is the person who knows all your stories, the person who WANTS to know all your stories.

It isn't a sadness, but a joy, that we don't do the same things for the length of our lives.

There's a pleasure to loving someone even when you know there's no chance in them loving you back. The pain I felt let me know I was still alive.

Our moment had passed somehow. I was different. He was, too. Without our "madness" to unite us, there wasn't anything much there. Or maybe too much had happened in too short a time. It's like when you take a trip with someone you don't know very well. Sometimes you can get very close very quickly, but then after the trip is over, you realise all that was a false sort of closeness. An intimacy based on the trip more than the travellers, if that makes any sense.

Sorry but nothing of much importance ever happened to me...I'm just a girl who forgot to look both ways before crossing the street.

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.

As many have discovered, it is entirely possible (although not particularly desirable) to love two people with all your heart. It is entirely possible to long for two lives, to feel that one life can't come close to containing it all.

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

What were you like," I asked her. "we're you happy? Or were you smiling because they told you to?

What's everyone talking about?" "The end of The Iliad." "That's the best part," Marx said. "Why is it the best part?" Sadie asked. "Because it's perfect," Marx said. "'Tamer of horses' is an honest profession. The lines mean that one doesn't have to be a god or a king for your life to have meaning.

Bookstores attract the right kind of folk. Good people like A.J. and Amelia. And I like talking about books with people who like talking about books. I like paper. I like how it feels, and I like the feel of a book in my back pocket. I like how a new book smells, too.

Every word the right one and exactly where it should be. That's basically the highest compliment I can give.

Most people's problems would be solved if they would only give more things a chance.

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.

For the longest time after that, neither of us said anything. I was unaccustomed to his silence, but I didn't mind it. I knew near everything about him, and he knew near everything about me, and all that made our quiet a kind of song. The kind you hum without even knowing what it is or why you're humming it. The kind that you've always known.

To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could.

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.

Ask two people to tell you anything, you'll get two versions. Even easy things like directions, let alone important or semi-controversial topics like why a fight started or what a person was generally like. If you don't know something for yourself, you just can't be sure.

He loved the intimacy of being in a tight group of people who had come together, miraculously, for a brief period in time, for the purpose of making art.

The difficulty of living alone is that any mess he makes he is forced to clean up himself. No, the real difficulty of living alone is that no one cares if you are upset.

It was never worth worrying about someone you didn't love. And it wasn't love if you didn't worry.

My heart was a little bit broken, but I still had to go to school. I buttoned my dress shirt over it and my winter coat, too. I hoped it didn't show too much.

The words you can't find, you borrow.