372 Quotes by Gabrielle Zevin

On Earth, Liz was constantly occupied with studying and finding a college and a career and all those other things that the adults in her life deemed terribly important. Since she had died, everything she was doing on Earth had seemed entirely meaningless. From Liz’s point of view, the question of what her life would be was now definitively answered. The story of her life is short and pointless: There once was a girl who got hit by a car and died. The end.

My grandmother was married for fifty-two years, until my grandfather died. She used to say that a bad marriage was one that hadn’t had enough time to get good again.

Did you have a ship?” Maya asks. “Yes. It had books on it, and it really was more of a research vessel. We studied a lot.” “You’re ruining this story.” “It’s a fact, Maya. There are murdering kinds of pirates and researching kinds of pirates, and your daddy was the latter.

I thought of summer as the living time; the rest of the year was the backward time, the writing time.

People like what they like, and that’s the great and terrible thing.

She could remember the sensation of flying through the air, which seemed to last an eternity. She could remember feeling reckless, happy, and doomed, all at the same time. She could remember thinking, I am above gravity.

Janine smiles. “Strike the second sentence. Reader will know. Show, don’t tell.

Novels certainly have their charms, but the most elegant creation in the prose universe is a short story.

It is lucky, she thinks, that we don’t feel all the love inside us every moment.