Gabrielle Zevin Quotes

The sweetest memory is that which involves something which one should not have done; the bitterest, that which involves something which one should not have done, and which one did not do.

To know that one has never really tried - that is the only death.

We've all got a black book of missed opportunities.

It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.

Sometimes I look back and I am shocked. Everyday of my life I have prepared for success, worked for it, waited for it, and you don't notice how the days pass until nearly a lifetime is finished. Then it hits you--the thing you have been waiting for has already gone by. And it was going in the other direction. It's like I've been waiting on the wrong side of the road for a bus that was already full." p. 265

The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.

I should have done more. I did too little of everything.

I always look back and say I should have made more. It should have been more lucrative, but it wasn't.

I had an opportunity with Baltimore to make it to the World Series, and that didn't happen.

An emotion that lives with me is a sense of 'what might have been' had injuries not robbed me of my most lethal weapon - speed.

I could have had class. I could have been a contender.

I missed the boat when I was doing Late Night.

I made a classic mistake. I held out for something better.

Life's missed opportunities, at the end, may seem more poignant to us than those we embraced - because in our imagination they have a perfection that reality can never rival.

It is always awfully easy to say what she would have done after you haven’t done it

I could have been a dancer. I just never got my shot at it.

Tours always leave us some regrets and thoughts that we could have done better and should have done better.

Sometimes you regret the things you do, but they're over and done. Regretting the things you didn't do is tougher because they're still out there, haunting you with the what ifs.

To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.

When you don't even get to try, you're like in a vacuum.

A story lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken

We could have been happy. I know that, and it is perhaps the hardest thing to know.

We often regret we did not do otherwise, when that very otherwise would, in all probability, have done for us.

We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting

It's not what you are, it's what you don't become that hurts.