Gabrielle Zevin > Quotes

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“You forget all of it anyway. . . You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. . . You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They’re the last to go. And then once you’ve forgotten enough, you love someone else.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“There will be other lives.
There will be other lives for nervous boys with sweaty palms, for bittersweet fumblings in the backseats of cars, for caps and gowns in royal blue and crimson, for mothers clasping pretty pearl necklaces around daughters' unlined necks, for your full name read aloud in an auditorium, for brand-new suitcases transporting you to strange new people in strange new lands.
And there will be other lives for unpaid debts, for one-night stands, for Prague and Paris, for painful shoes with pointy toes, for indecision and revisions.
And there will be other lives for fathers walking daughters down aisles.
And there will be other lives for sweet babies with skin like milk.
And there will be other lives for a man you don't recognize, for a face in a mirror that is no longer yours, for the funerals of intimates, for shrinking, for teeth that fall out, for hair on your chin, for forgetting everything. Everything.
Oh, 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's life is a beautiful mess.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him. Apparently I could.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“No one actually needs another person or another person's love to survive. Love is when we have irrationally convinced ourselves that we do.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“You forget all of it anyway. First, you forget everything you learned-the dates of the Hay-Herran Treaty and Pythagorean Theorem. You especially forget everything you didn't really learn, but just memorized the night before. You forget the names of all but one or two of your teachers, and eventually you'll forget those, too. You forget your junior class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend's home phone number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times. For me, it was something by Simon & Garfunkel. Who knows what it will be for you? And eventually, but slowly, oh so slowly, you forget your humiliations-even the ones that seemed indelible just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. Who went to a good college. Who threw the best parties Who could get you pot. You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They're the last to go. And then once you've forgotten enough, you love someone else.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“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?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“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”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“Above all, mine is a love story. Unlike most love stories, this one involves chance, gravity, a dash of head trauma. It began with a coin toss. The coin came up tails. I was heads. Had it gone my way, there might not be a story at all. Just a chapter, or a sentence in a book whose greater theme had yet to be determined. Maybe this chapter would've had the faintest whisper of love about it. But maybe not. Sometimes, a girl needs to lose.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“...lies can sound awfully pretty when a girl is in love with the person telling them.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, All These Things I've Done

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“The scent is sweet and meloncholy. A bit like dying, a bit like falling in love.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin

“A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, All These Things I've Done

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Margarettown

“They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.”
― Gabrielle Zevin

“What were you like," I asked her. "we're you happy? Or were you smiling because they told you to?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“On Elsewhere we fool ourselves into thinking we know what will be just because we know the amount of time we have left. We know this, but we never really know what will be. We never know what will happen...”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“Why do two people fall in love? It's a mystery.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“And I was crying for gravity. It had sent me down the stairs, and I'd thought that meant something, but maybe it was just the direction that all things tend to flow.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“Daddy always said you only explained things to the people that actually mattered.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, All These Things I've Done

“Betty inhales sharply, 'It's just I thought I had lost you forever.'
Oh, Betty, don't you know there's no such thing as forever?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“ The baby, a girl, is born at 6:24 a.m.
She weighs six pounds, ten ounces.
The mother takes the baby in her arms and asks her, "Who are you, my little one?"
And in response, this baby, who is Liz and not Liz at the same time, laughs.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin

“It's hard to believe. Where does the times go?' Betty sighs. 'I've always hated that phrase. It makes it would like time went on a holiday, and is expected back any day now. Time flies is another one I hate. Apparently, time does quite a bit of traveling, though.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“I have so much paperwork. I'm afraid my paperwork has paperwork.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“In my humble opinion, love is when a person believes that he, she or it can't live without some other he, she or it...I said believes. No one actually needs another person or another person's live to survive. Love, Lizzie, is when we have irrationally convinced ourselves that we do.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“Should have. Would have. Could have. Didn't.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, All These Things I've Done

“Sometimes things seem so unbearable in the middle of the night, don't they? In the middle of the night, we're all such children.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Margarettown

“Daddy always said the only thing worth begging for was your life, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe sometimes your love is a little bit worth begging for, too.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, All These Things I've Done

“Let's stay young forever. Young, stupid, and pretty. Sounds like a plan, don't you think?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, All These Things I've Done

“It is a lie that people who love each other must know everything about each other. Love must occasionally allow for a gap.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Margarettown

“In a way, whoever you know in a certain place defines that place for you.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Margarettown

“And when she dreams, she dreams of a girl who was lost at sea but one day found the shore.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“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”
― Gabrielle Zevin

“I let myself feel good and sorry for myself, but only for a second. Daddy always said that the most useless of all human emotions was self-pity.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, All These Things I've Done

“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”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac