Top 144 Quotes & Sayings by Gabrielle Zevin

I think you can do a lot, like describing people with their physical characteristics, things like that, but to me, I've always found it to be a much more informative question to ask somebody what they read.

On some level, I think we want our reading self to represent our best self.

When I first started writing, I used to listen to music all the time because it would make time pass more quickly. And then I started to wonder if the music wasn't affecting my writing in ways that I didn't necessarily intend.

Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank you note.

People choose to read, and it takes effort. It's not one of those hobbies that asks nothing of the person who is doing it. It's more than a hobby.

I'm very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it's great to be aware of how publishing works.

Sometimes, readers, when they're young, are given, say, a book like 'Moby Dick' to read. And it is an interesting, complicated book, but it's not something that somebody who has never read a book before should be given as an example of why you'll really love to read, necessarily.

I knew I wanted to do something creative, and you don't necessarily go to Harvard to do that. It's not the best choice for creative writing.

When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.

Before I liked to write, I liked to type. I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter.

I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter. I thought that this electric typewriter was about the most fascinating toy in the world - I liked the little bell and the sounds and the feel of the keys and especially the erase key.

I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn't a reader yet has just not found the right book.

I'm like a unicorn; I'm a midlist writer who hasn't done anything else but write. But because I wasn't amazingly famous, I didn't become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan Franzen or a Joshua Ferris.

In a way, publishing in 2005 was similar to publishing in 1950. Nobody kept blogs; that was still optional. I didn't even have a website then.

My grandparents used to bring me books every time they saw me.

I'm in the middle of a 25-city book tour, and I like watching what people buy in bookstores. I see people buy books that I strongly suspect they will never read, and as an author, I must tell you, I don't mind this one bit. We buy books aspirationally.

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 don't believe in writer's block.

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.

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

For the record, I have long suspected that my favorite book is actually 'Charlotte's Web.'

It's when you don't need something that you tend to lose it.

Intimacy doesn't have all that much to do with backseats of cars. Real intimacy is brushing your teeth together.

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.

When I was in my twenties and broke, I'd buy books before food. A meal will sustain you for a few hours, a good book will sustain you for life.

The words you can't find, you borrow. We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart. We are not quite novels. The analogy he is looking for is almost there. We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that. In the end, we are collected works.

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

Chocolate doesn't solve everything, Nana." "It solves a whole heck of a lot, though.

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.

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

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.

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

Diving is a leap of faith plus gravity.

It was odd to have something so personal out there in that way, but the good thing about art is that no one necessarily knows what you mean by it anyway.

A life isn't measured in hours or minutes. Its the quality not the length. All things considered I've been luckier than most. Almost sixteen years on Earth, and I've already had eight good ones here. I expect to have eight more before all's good said and done. Nearly thirty-two years total, and that's not too shabby

And when she dreams, she dreams of a girl who was lost at sea but one day found the shore.

We aren't the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.

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.

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

I'm allergic to sad memories. It's the worst.

I have so much paperwork. I'm afraid my paperwork has paperwork.

Wounds are like water set to boil - they heal best left unwatched.

We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works

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

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

Let's stay young forever. Young, stupid, and pretty. Sounds like a plan, don't you think?

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.

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

In you, I found infinity. In you, I was reborn

It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him. Apparently I could.

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?

The only love she inspires is the canine kind.

Daddy always said you only explained things to the people that actually mattered.

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

Death is a state of mind---many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.

In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know. For everyone else, it's just another end.

Did you know that there are over three hundred words for love in canine?

You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?

Someday, we’ll run into each other again, I know it. Maybe I’ll be older and smarter and just plain better. If that happens, that’s when I’ll deserve you. But now, at this moment, you can’t hook your boat to mine, because I’m liable to sink us both.

I did learn something about insanity while I was down there. People go crazy, not because they are crazy, but because it's the best available option at the time.