Gabrielle Zevin
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.Collection: Children
But in my defense, I knew enough about her to know I wanted to know everything else; I knew as much about her as she wanted me to know; I knew as much about her as anyone ever knows about anyone. And isn't love just curiosity at the beginning anyway?Collection: Curiosity
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.Collection: Song
It was funny how dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or the other. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.Collection: Dad
I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.Collection: Boys
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.Collection: Over You
Why do two people fall in love? It's a mystery.Collection: Falling In Love
Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down the road and someday, you do not now when, you will make a wrong tun. At the end of the road, when you're least expecting it, he (or indeed she) will be there.Collection: Driving Down The Road
Hi there," squeaked a precocious little voice, "you are speaking to Chloe Fusakawa, and I have just learned how to answer the phone.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: Flow
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.Collection: Heart
Daddy once said, "If you don't know what you believe, Annie, you'll be a lost soul.Collection: Believe
I know you did, lass. You're the toughest girl I know." "'Lass'? Where did that come from?" "I don't know. I just felt the urge to call you that.Collection: Girl
Maybe if I'd been braver in that moment, I would have cried.Collection: Moments
There's the tree with the branches that everyone sees, and then there's the upside-down root tree, growing the opposite way. So Earth is the branches, growing in opposing but perfect symmetry. The branches don't think much about the roots, and maybe the roots don't think much about the branches, but all the time, they're connected by the trunk, you know?Collection: Thinking
It was such a sweet, sad song with such sweet, sad lyrics. Old-fashioned a little, but also timeless.Collection: Song
Eye contact made people think you were being truthful even if you weren't.Collection: Eye
It wasn't even 8:00 yet. Pretty early for such deep thoughts.Collection: Deep Thought
Daddy always said that an option that you know to have a bad outcome is only a fool's option, i.e., not an option at all. And I liked to think that Daddy hadn't raised a fool.Collection: Thinking
It's a tragic fact to die in an accidentCollection: Facts
Win walked over to me. He held out his palm. In the middle of it was a single black sequin from the dress Scarlet had lent me. "You lost this," he said. I giggled, slightly embarrassed to be leaving bits of myself behind. "I'm shedding.Collection: Winning
My beautiful Win. I wanted to kiss him on every last broken place, but his mother and my lawyer were there. So, instead I started to cry.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Smart
Oh, all stories are the same, aren't they? Men and women fall in love or out of love. People are born; people die. It al ends happily or it all ends sadly, and the difference matters only to the people involved.Collection: Falling In Love
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.Collection: Sorry
I met a travler from an ancient land.Collection: Land
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.Collection: Girl
Speak up,' says Myrna who has a fuzzy white caterpillar of a moustache. 'My hearing's not so good.' 'I WAS SHOT IN THE HEAD.' Liz turns to Thandi. 'I thought you said you didn't remember how you got the hole in your head.' Thandi apologizes. 'I just remembered.' 'Shot in the head!' Florence-scratchy-voice says. 'Oy, that's rough.' 'Aw, it's nothing special. Happens pretty regularly where I'm from,' Thandi says. 'WHAT?' asks Myrna with the moustache. 'Say it toward my left ear, that's the good one.' 'I SAID, "IT'S NOTHING SPECIAL,"' Thandi yells/Collection: White
In life, Jane reflected, the most interesting things tend to happen when you're on your way to do something else.Collection: Interesting
It's a weakness to apologize before hearing what the other person's grievances are. You don't want to end up creating new grievances where there were none to begin with. Another Daddy-ism, if you hadn't already guessed.Collection: Creating
Saying you're through with romance is like saying you're done with living, Betty. Life is better with a little romance, you know.Collection: Romance
Covers matter. In my experience, a different cover can make you think you're reading an entirely different book.Collection: Book
Oh," says Owen, "but I would have, you know." "I know you would have," says Liz, "and knowing you would have is nearly as good.Collection: Knowing
I do believe that food lobbies exert enormous, at times insidious, power over what we eat, that our water supplies are not being protected as much as they probably should be and that, in general, people are more interested in smart phones than museums.Collection: Smart
Liz looks at the tissue box, which is decorated with drawings of snowmen engaged in various holiday activities. One of the snowmen is happily placing a smiling rack of gingerbread men in an oven. Baking gingerbread men, or any cooking for that matter, is probably close to suicide for a snowman, Liz thinks. Why would a snowman voluntarily engage in an activity that would in all likelihood melt him? Can snowmen even eat? Liz glares at the box.Collection: Suicide
In a way, whoever you know in a certain place defines that place for you.Collection: Way
People are capable of great, great change during the span of one lifetime. And women even more than men.Collection: Men
Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Love Is
Saying you’re through with romance is like saying you’re done with living, Betty. Life is better with a little romance, you know.Collection: Romance
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.Collection: Reading
They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?Collection: Reading
My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.Collection: Reading