Quotes from Gabrielle Zevin

Every book is a world.

If this were a novel, I'd stop reading right now. I'd throw it across the room.

I was just thinking... isn't it lucky that we decided to become co-editors? If one takes a blow to the head, the other can fill in. If the other's lung spontaneoulsy collapses, the one can fill in. It's a perfect system once you think about it." ~Will Landsman

In a way, whoever you know in a certain place defines that place for you.

When she told me it was her favorite, it suggested to me strange and wonderful things about her character that I had not guessed, dark places that I might like to visit. People tell boring lies about politics, God, and love. You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?

Showing up is what counts.

There's something kind of heroic about being a bookseller.

Hi there," squeaked a precocious little voice, "you are speaking to Chloe Fusakawa, and I have just learned how to answer the phone.

It was a nice day, and I don't mean that it was sunny either. It was humid and not too cool, like winter was getting annoyed with itself and wanted it to be spring just as much as everyone else.

My life is in these books. Read these and know my heart. We are not quire novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works.

Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down the road and someday, you do not now when, you will make a wrong tun. At the end of the road, when you're least expecting it, he (or indeed she) will be there.

Eye contact made people think you were being truthful even if you weren't.

It is a lie that people who love each other must know everything about each other. Love must occasionally allow for a gap.

You try again. You fail better.

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.

How much of your life had been happenstance? How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky? But then, weren't all lives that way? Who could say, in the end, that they had chosen any of it?

I love that world more, I think, because it is perfectible. Because I have perfected it. The actual world is the random garbage fire it always is. There's not a goddamn thing I can do about the actual world's code.

How I will miss the horses.

A place is not really a place without a bookstore.

No one travels without purpose. Those who are lost wish to be lost.

But I wondered if all this kissing was a bad habit with him and me. The thing we did with our mouths instead of talking.

If this were a game, he could hit pause. He could restart, say different things, the right ones this time. He could search his inventory for the item that would make Sadie not leave.

A good marriage is, at least, one part conspiracy.

There ain't nobody in the world like book people. It's a business of gentlemen and gentlewomen.