Quotes from Gabrielle Zevin

The idea of Solution was that if you won the game on points, you lost it morally.

Die Liebe ist Konstante und Variable zugleich.

documentaries Indie Game: The Movie, directed by James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot, and GTFO, directed by Shannon Sun-Higginson. I read Indie Games by Bounthavy Suvilay after I finished writing, and it's a beautiful book for those looking to see how artful games can

Sadie and Marx took a cab back to the hotel. "Do you mind what your father said?" she asked him. "No," Marx said. "I loved being a student actor. I was fully devoted to it, and now I'm not. I think if I'd become a professional, I would likely have fallen out of love with it anyway. It isn't a sadness, but a joy, that we don't do the same things for the length of our lives.

Sadie had willed herself to be great: art doesn't typically get made by happy people.

He found himself uttering a series of "excuse mes" that he did not mean. A truly magnificent thing about the way the brain was coded, Sam thought, was that it could say "Excuse me" while meaning "Screw you.

facts about The Oregon Trail, can be found in You Have Died of Dysentery: The Creation of the Oregon Trail—the Iconic Educational Game of the 1980s, by R. Philip Bouchard

My god, she thought, he is so easy to love.

Amelia's mother had died two years ago, and though their relationship had been challenging at times, she misses her with an unexpected ferocity. For instance, until her death, her mother had sent her new underwear in the mail every other month. Amelia had not once had to buy underwear her whole life. Recently, she had found herself standing in the lingerie department at TJ Maxx, and as she went through the panty bin, she had begun to cry: No one will ever love me that much again.

Click on this word, he thought, and you will find links to everything it means. Because you are my oldest friend. Because once, when I was at my lowest, you saved me. Because I might have died without you or ended up in a children's psychiatric hospital. Because I owe you. Because, selfishly, I see a future where we make fantastic games together, if you can manage to get out of bed.

No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.

A woman should never please other people at the expense of pleasing herself.

She knew that the presence of the timesheet made it seem as if she had an ulterior motive, though the truth was obvious to her: Sadie Green liked being praised, and Sam Masur was the best friend she had ever had.

They loved him. He was more handsome in front of a crowd; his limp, less apparent; his voice, warm and authoritative. It was as if all these years Sam had been waiting for an audience.

she had been struck by how the exact same route could look and feel so different. One minute, Sam was there, the game was completed, and the world was filled with potential. Twelve hours later, Sam was gone, the game was far from her thoughts, and the world was grim and murderous. It is the same world, she thought, but I am different. Or is it a different world, but I am the same? For a moment, she felt dangerously untethered from her body and from reality

A little girl hitting a violent predator with a log is hand-to-hand combat and that's honest. A man, who is represented by a hand, shooting a series of unknown henchmen is dishonest.

But returning to my original point, there were many other ways—indeed, infinite ways—we could have met.

There are no ghosts, but up here' -- she gestured toward her head-- 'it's a haunted house.

Sadie hadn't worked on a game of her own since she'd been with Dov, though she did occasionally help him with his. It was easier, in some ways, to work with and for Dov than it was to do her own work.

his eyes reminded Sam of his own. They had the patina of a person who had felt pain and expected to feel it again.

A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.

There were smart people, yes. There were people with whom you might have a decent conversation for twenty minutes. But to find someone who you wanted to talk to for 609 hours—that was rare. Even Marx—Marx was devoted, creative, and bright, but he was not Sadie.

he thought that the crowd seemed to part for her, in a way that the world never moved for him.

But then he reminded himself: They are not only my friends. They are my colleagues. He had turned them into his colleagues, and in a strange way, that was comforting to Sam. Ichigo bonded them to him for life.