Best 27 quotes of Jeff Zentner on MyQuotes

But the thing with a best friend is that you’re never talking about nothing. Even when you’re talking about nothing, it’s something. The times when you think you’re talking about nothing, you’re actually talking about how you have someone with whom you can talk about nothing, and it’s fine.

For a long time I shined my light for someone other than me. But not anymore. Now I shine bright for me. You can create light even when everyone's left you behind because that's what you do. It's what I do.

For the most part, you don't hold the people you love in your heart because they rescued you from drowning or pulled you from a burning house. Mostly you hold them in your heart because they save you, in a million quiet and perfect ways, from being alone.

Here's where stories come in. They tell us the truth of other people's lives. They shine a light on shared humanity. They make us understand that we are different, but not 'different'. That our differences are something that makes the human tapestry richer and more colorful, and not a threat.

How is it every time we're talking about the real world, you manage to bring up fantasy, and every time we're talking about fantasy, you manage to bring up the real world? Travis shrugged. "My fantasies are more interesting than the real world and machines and tools are more interesting than you guys' fantasies.

I’d say the winner of this debate is the God of Death, who’s now several minutes closer to claiming all of us.

I’m glad things end, though. It forces you to love them ferociously while you have them. There’s nothing worth having that doesn’t die.

In the coming days, there's a question I want you to ask yourselves: "If not me, then who?" If not me, then who will stand for people whose voices aren't being heard? If not me, then who will stand for the right of all people to lead lives of joy and dignity? If not me, then who will stand for facts and reason and learning and truth? If not me, then who will stand for kindness? If not me, then who will stand for honesty? If not me, then who will stand for generosity? If not me, then who will stand for equality and justice?

I still have a last-day-of-sixth-grade feeling. All year you’re excited for school to end so you can move on to junior high, but then the day comes and you realize that something that was an important part of your life is dying. And endings are still so new that you don’t know quite how to feel. You find an excuse not to run out the door when the bell rings and school’s out. You talk to your teacher one last time. You use the restroom one last time. You take a circuitous route back to your classroom. On your way out, you look back and sigh, and you experience this deep wishfulness, and you wonder if life is just a series of endings. New beginnings don’t make endings any easier.

I think if what you'd do for your last day on Earth doesn't look like a pretty normal day for you, you probably need to reexamine your life.

It’s comforting to know that you don’t have to be excellent to not be completely forgotten.

I want you to be careful in this world. My heart is wrapped up in you.

Most of all, I think it’s people who love to be reminded that sometimes you do your best and you come up short, but there’s still a place in the world for people like that.

Night descends as a falling blanket. The city is a constellation of lights, each one representing a hand that turned the lightbulb. A hand attached to a mind containing a universe of memories and myths; a natural history of loves and wounds. Life everywhere. Pulsing, humming. A great wheel turning. A light blinks out here, one replaces it there. Always dying. Always living. We survive until we don’t. All of this ending and beginning is the only thing that is infinite.

No one ever says on their deathbed they wish they’d loved fewer people.

Nothing makes you feel more naked than someone identifying a desire you never knew you possessed.

Nothing stops when we’re gone,” Lydia said. “The seasons don’t stop. This river doesn’t stop. Vultures will keep flying in circles. The lives of the people we love won’t stop. Time keeps unspooling. Stories keep getting written.

Out of nowhere, I'm taken up in an unnameable ecstasy. The kind that comes from no specific wellspring and overflows before you even knew it was building in you. Everything is so beautiful, so good, you feel like you don't even need to breathe air anymore.

She laughs. A clean, bright, and silver sound, like wind chimes.

So when I watch trains, it makes me think about how much movement there is in the world. How every train has dozens of cars and every car has hundreds of parts, and all those parts and cars work day after day. And then there are all these other motions. People are born and die. Seasons change. Rivers flow to the sea. Earth circles the sun and the moon circles Earth. Everything whirring and spinning toward something. And I get to be part of it for a little while, the way I get to watch a train for a minute or two, and then it's gone.

That wouldn't be a bad way to die...giving off light for millions of years after you're gone.

The funny thing is that I never see the world any differently through new glasses. I only ever see things differently when I look in the mirror.

There are books stacked high around them - the way opportunity and possibility are stacked around them.

The universe - fate - is cruel and random. Things happen for many reasons. Things happen for no reason. To shoulder the burden of the universe's caprice is too much for anyone. And it's not fair to you.

Wanting to believe something is powerful

What you call pride, I call courage.

Writing is something that you can learn only by doing. To become a writer, you need an imagination, which you clearly have. You need to read books, which you clearly do. And you need to write, which you don't yet do, but should.