Quotes from Gabrielle Zevin

Remember, Maya: the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.

But I believe good things happen everyday. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that's life, isn't it?

On, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human life is a beautiful mess.

It's difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything's changed.

They should tell you when you're born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.

They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?

We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life 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.

It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us," the passage goes, "but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down a road. And someday, you do not know when, he, or indeed she, will be there. You will be loved because for the first time in your life, you will truly not be alone. You will have chosen to not be alone.

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.

No one actually needs another person or another person's love to survive. Love is when we have irrationally convinced ourselves that we do.

I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart.

A place ain't a place without a bookstore

Love stories are written in millimeters and milliseconds with a fast, dull pencil whose marks you can barely see, they are written in miles and eons with a chisel on the side of a mountiantop

Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you're the only person in the room.

People, you'll find, aren't usually all good or bad. Sometimes they're just a little bit good and a whole lot bad. And sometimes they're mostly good with a dash of bad. And most of us, well, we fall in the middle somewhere.

lies can sound awfully pretty when a girl is in love with the person telling them.

I know he's a good person. And he said he was sorry. And I love him. And when you love a person, you have to forgive him sometimes.

i've made room for you, she said. if you want it, there's room.

I myself am mixed race - my mother is Korean, and my father is an American Jew - so I've always felt other.

I wish that the adults who are 'in power' cared more about what their children read. Books are incredibly powerful when we are young - the books I read as a child have stayed with me my entire life - and yet, the people who write about books, for the most part, completely ignore children's literature.

I hadn't ever felt any particular calling to be a novelist, and I clearly remember telling a friend of mine about six months before I started work on 'Elsewhere' that I would never write a novel.

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.

If you are going to forgive a person, Liz decides, it is best to do it sooner rather than later. Later, Liz knows from experience, could be sooner than you thought.

But then again maybe "I will" is nicer. It has a future in it.