Elsewhere

by Gabrielle Zevin

“In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know,” the pug whimpers miserably. “For everyone else, it’s just another end.”

‘Everyone loves you when you’re dead: once you’re dead, you’re made for life.’

If you have to be dead, it is better to be somewhere, anywhere, than nowhere at all.

“If you think your death gives you free rein to act as you please, you are wrong,” says the Captain. “Dead wrong,” he adds a moment later.

“Well, you become a baby again. And when you’re seven days old, you and all the other babies are sent down the River, back to Earth to be born anew. It’s called the Release.”

“Young people tend to think they’re immortal. Many of them can’t conceive of themselves as dead, Elizabeth.”

Dying seems to entail a great deal more work than Liz initially thought. In a way, dying isn’t that different from school.

love is when a person believes that he, she, or it can’t live without some other he, she, or it.

As many have discovered, it is entirely possible (though 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.

there’s this fairy world, and then there’s the real world. And the way Shakespeare writes it, there’s really no difference between the two. The fairies are just like real people with human problems and everything. And the human people and the fairies live side by side. They’re together and they’re apart. And the fairy world might be a dream, but the real world could be a dream also.

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.

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.

“A life isn’t measured in hours and minutes. It’s the quality, not the length.

There was a time Liz was afraid that she would forget things, but by the time she truly began to forget, she forgot to be afraid to forget.