01c. 1977 ADSomeday, 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 / quote ↗
02c. 1977 ADYou 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 / quote ↗
03c. 1977 ADI 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 / quote ↗
04c. 1977 ADThere'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 / quote ↗
05c. 1977 ADA life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.Gabrielle Zevin / quote ↗
06c. 1977 ADIn 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 / quote ↗
07c. 1977 ADLove 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 mountiantopGabrielle Zevin / quote ↗
08c. 1977 AD...an irresistible of why we read and why we love.We are not quite novels.We are not quite short stories.In the end, we are collected works.Gabrielle Zevin / quote ↗
09c. 1977 ADSaying you're through with romance is like saying you're done with living, Betty. Life is better with a little romance, you know.Gabrielle Zevin / quote ↗
11c. 1977 ADDeath is a state of mind---many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.Gabrielle Zevin / quote ↗
12c. 1977 ADAll of these teeth had once been in real, live people. They had talked and smiled and eaten and sang and cursed and prayed. They had brushed and flossed and died. In English class, we read poems about death, but here, right in front of me was a poem about death too.Gabrielle Zevin / quote ↗
14c. 1977 ADIf this were a novel, I'd stop reading right now. I'd throw it across the room.Gabrielle Zevin / quote ↗
15c. 1977 ADIt'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 / quote ↗
16c. 1977 ADThey had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?Gabrielle Zevin / quote ↗
18c. 1977 ADWhen 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.Gabrielle Zevin / quote ↗
19c. 1977 ADI do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn't be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children's books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires.Gabrielle Zevin / quote ↗
21c. 1977 ADAnd then, despite the fact that A. J. does not believe in God, he closes his eyes and thanks whomever, the higher power, with all his porcupine heart.Gabrielle Zevin / quote ↗
22c. 1977 ADPeople are capable of great, great change during the span of one lifetime. And women even more than men.Gabrielle Zevin / quote ↗
23c. 1977 ADAll women are many women! I'm afraid you've never known very much about women.Gabrielle Zevin / quote ↗
24c. 1977 ADIt 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 / quote ↗
