Gabrielle Zevin

“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.”

“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”

“My heart was a little bit broken, but I still had to go to school. I buttoned my dress shirt over it and my winter coat, too. I hoped it didn't show too much.”

“But I wondered if all this kissing was a bad habit with him and me. The thing we did with our mouths instead of talking.”

“I have so much paperwork. I'm afraid my paperwork has paperwork.”

“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.”

“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/”

“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.”

“In life, Jane reflected, the most interesting things tend to happen when you're on your way to do something else.”

“In you, I found infinity. In you, I was reborn”

“People are capable of great, great change during the span of one lifetime. And women even more than men.”

“All women are many women! I'm afraid you've never known very much about women.”

“The casualities seemed to go on and on. Just when I thought I was done losing her, I would find yet another way to love her all over again.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“if you were older you might agree with me. you might say that real love steals nothing. you might say that real love leaves a person intact. you would be wrong, jane. love is a greedy toddler who knows only the word 'mine.”

“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?”

“i've made room for you, she said. if you want it, there's room. ”

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

“Wounds are like water set to boil – they heal best left unwatched...”

“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?”

“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.”

“What were you like," I asked her. "we're you happy? Or were you smiling because they told you to?”

“It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him. Apparently I could.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's a tragic fact to die in an accident”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“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...”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The only love she inspires is the canine kind.”

“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.”