David Levithan Quotes

How did my world get so small?

Betrayal. Lust. Secrecy. Devotion. I think we do these things to feel more alive. When the truth is that alive is alive -- you can feel it in anything, if you give it a chance.

Ultimately, the universe doesn't care about us. Time doesn't care about us. That's why we have to care about each other.

If you put enough closets together, you have enough space for a room. If you put enough rooms together, you have enough space for a house. If you put enough houses together, you have space for a town, then a city, then a nation, then a world.

Whatever you had -- I don't know what it was, and that's fine. But it must not be easy for you. You miss him, and that's okay. But you have to figure that if it's too much hard to hang on, then maybe you should let go.

It's b******* to think of friendship and romance being different. They're not. They're just variations of the same love. Variatons of the same desire to be close.

Invoking the moral high ground somehow makes you lose it. Using a secret as a weapon makes you almost as bad as the transgressor.

All through their relationship, Harry was the one in charge, Harry was the one who gave them direction. This wasn’t because Harry was smarter or even better at it than Craig was; it just meant more to him, to be in control. And Craig didn’t really care, so he ceded it away. He liked not being responsible all the time.Complacency. Craig realizes now that this was complacency. One of the reasons he liked the sound of Harry’s voice was because it meant he didn’t have to use his own. But eventually this strategy backfired. Eventually Harry realized what was happening, and didn’t feel right about it. He wanted Craig to fight a little more, but by the time Craig started fighting for them to stay together, he had already lost.

Our moments are music, and sometimes – just sometimes – we can catch them and put them into some lasting form. If we didn’t have music, I don’t think we could ever be truly happy, and if we didn’t have special moments, we would never find music.

Some of our parents were always on our side. Some of our parents chose to banish us rather than see us for who we were. And some of our parents, when they found out we were sick, stopped being dragons and became dragonslayers instead. Sometimes that’s what it takes—the final battle. But it should take much, much less than that.

The way you're singing in your sleepThe way you look before you leapThe strange illusions that you keepYou don't knowBut I'm noticingThe way your touch turns into arcsThe way you slide into the darkThe beating of my open heartYou don't knowBut I'm noticing

Breath and heat and contact and shirts off and skin on skin and smiles and murmurs and the enormity revealing itself in the tiniest of gestures, the most delicate sensations.

I’m so sorry,” I continue. And it’s like the last word is a hurdle and I can’t leap it, because something in the word snags my voice and suddenly I am giving everything up. I am letting my shoulders fall and I am feeling myself become the absence, feeling myself become that gasp and sob.

In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love with a gender.I have fallen for individuals. I know this is hard for people to do, but I don't understand why it's so hard, when it's so obvious.

tiny doesn't just sing these words - he belts them. it's like a parade coing out of his mouth. i have no doubt the words travel over lake michigan to most of canada and on to the north pole. the farmers of saskatchewan are crying. santa is turning to mrs. claus and saying 'what the fuck is that? - will grayson

Love doesn’t have to be on Valentine’s Day. It doesn’t have to be by the time you turn eighteen or thirty-three or fifty-nine. It doesn’t have to conform to whatever is usual. It doesn’t have to be kismet at once, or rhapsody by the third day.It just has to be. In time. In place. In spirt.It just has to be.

He was beautiful in the way that a breeze is beautiful—the kind of beauty you feel gratitude for.

the answer is to just let gothe betrayal is to the pastthe cocoon dangles emptythe desire outlasts the objectthe effort lingersthe frustration is in how pointless the effort wasthe ghost does not make itself transparentthe heart knows nothing except its own mindthe ideas are not enoughthe jealousy is always therethe killing blow is sometimes the softestthe life you lead can be detouredthe moment you know cannot be taken backthe new you will try to bury the old methe opportunity has passedthe past is inopportunethe questions all grow from whythe reality will always be contendedthe sadness will ebbthe trouble is the time it might takethe ugly words cannot be erased, only discreditedthe versions are never the samethe wonder is that we make it throughthe x is the unknown variablethe yesterday cannot be repeatedthe zenith is the point when you look down and realize you’re no longer below

I’ve always resented Hermione, because I wanted to be her so badly and she never seemed to appreciate as much as I thought she should that she got to be her. She got to live at Hogwarts and be friends with Harry and kiss Ron, which was supposed to happen to me.

Part of my music is being alone, having that time to shut down all other noises to hear the tune underneath.

Love, he thinks, is a lie that people tell each other in order to make the world bearable. He is not up for the lie anymore. And nobody is going to lie to him like that, anyway. He's not even worth a lie.

Indelible, adj.That first night, you took your finger and pointed to the top of my head, then traced a line between my eyes, down my nose, over my lips, my chin, my neck, to the center of my chest. It was so surprising. I knew I would never mimic it. That one gesture would be yours forever.

It doesn’t work,” she continues, unclasping her hands, smoothing her skirt. “What you’re feeling right now doesn’t work. You can’t wander around and think the wandering will call them back. Believe me. I know you don’t want to hear the long view, but let me tell you. You are so young. I know it’s none of my business. But still.

Well, I agree that 'trial and error' is a pretty pessimistic name for it. And maybe that's what it is most of the time. But I think the point is that it's not just try-error. Most of the time, it's try-error-try.

If you want to live within the definition of your own truth, you have to choose to go through the painful process of finding it.

We come to a corner where there are a few people protesting the festivities. I don't understand this at all. It's like protesting the fact that some people are red-haired. In my experience, desire is desire, love is love.

He kisses me back with a kiss like a smile.

It's hard to think of such things when you are busy dreaming or loving or screwing. The context falls away.

and when hecatches meoff guardand says'i love you'i catch himoff guardand say 'i need your help.

In an age of guidebooks, websites, and radio waves, discovery has nearly become a lost feeling. If anything, it is now a matter of expectations to surpass—rarely a matter of unexpected wonderment. It is unusual to find a situation that appears without word, or a place that was not known to be on the road.

Thoughts can follow you anywhere.

Be careful what you're doing, because no one is ever who you want them to be. And the less you really know them, the more likely you are to confuse them with the girl or boy in your head.

If I'm not telling you something, it's for a reason. Just because you trust me, it doesn't mean I have to automatically trust you. Trust doesn't work like that.

No more looking at a wall and pretending it's a mirror. No more shelving fiction in the non-fiction section. No more thinking I could get away with it.

It might feel like the end of the world--but it's the beginning of your art.

There are boys lying awake, hating themselves. There are boys screwing for the right reasons and boys screwing for the wrong ones. There are boys sleeping on benches and under bridges, and luckier unlucky boys sleeping in shelters, which feel like safety but not like home. There are boys so enraptured by love that they can't get their hearts to slow down enough to get some rest, and other boys so damaged by love that they can't stop picking at their pain. There are boys who clutch secrets at night in the same way they clutch denial in the day. There are boys who do not think of themselves at all when they dream. There are boys who will be woken in the night. There are boys who fall asleep with phones to their ears.

it's not his bodythat changesright away.it's somethinginside. he sayshe wants tobe a littleweaker. i don'tunderstand.i say 'thinner?'and he says'no, i wantto be strongerin a differentway.' notbecause of me,but for me.

My life changes all the time, but books don't change. My reading of them changes-- I can bring new things to them each time. But the words are familiar words. The world is a place you've been before, and it welcomes you back.

Some people are given relatively fair lives. But others-they carry the burden of the unfairness of the world.

Do you wonder why we wander?” Cal had asked.It was the night of the first snow; you could hear the branches bending and the iciclesfalling outside the window, beyond the wall.They were warmth together. They were hot breath and blankets and wrapping themselves

I'm persnickety," I confessed. "Not, incidentally, to the point of being snarly. But still. Delightful and persnickety are not a common blend." "Do you want to know why I never married?" "The question wasn't at the top of my list," I admitted. The old woman made me meet her eye. "Listen to me; I never married because I was easily bored. It's an awful, self-defeating trait to have. It is much better to be too easily interested.

New Yorkers love the bigness -- the skyscrapers, the freedom, the lights. But they also love it when they can carve out some smallness for themselves. When the guy at the corner store knows which newspaper you want. When the barista has your order ready before you open your mouth. When you start to recognize the people in your orbit, and you know that, say, if you're waiting for the subway at eight fifteen on the dot, odds are the redhead with the red umbrella is going to be there too.

There are many things that can keep you in a relationship. Fear of being alone, Fear of disrupting the arrangement of your life.A decision to settle for something that's okay. Because you don;t know if you can get any better. Or maybe there's the irrational belief that it will get better even if you know he won't change.

That's what it felt like - that if I let a little of the hurt out, it would keep pouring out until I was a deflated balloon of a person, with a big monster of hurt in front of me.

The sound of words as they're said is always different from the sound they make when they're heard, because the speakers hears some of the sound from the inside.

You know the reason The Beatles made it so big?...'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.' First single. Fucking brilliant. Perhaps the most fucking brilliant song ever written. Because they nailed it. That's what everyone wants. Not 24/7 hot wet sex. Not a marriage that lasts a hundred years. Not a Porsche...or a million-dollar crib. No. They wanna hold your hand. They have such a feeling that they can't hide. Every single successful song of the past fifty years can be traced back to 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.' And every single successful love story has those unbearable and unbearably exciting moments of hand-holding.

I can see that the sadness has returned. And it's not a beautiful sadness- beautiful sadness is a myth. Sadness turns our features to clay, not porcelain.

This is the power of a kiss: It does not have the power to kill you. But it has the power to bring you to life.

I had gotten so used to being alone, but never entirely used to it. Never used to it enough to stop wanting the alternative.

I want to have faith in strangers. I want to have faith in what we're all going to do next. But I'm worried. I see things shifting from United We Stand to God Bless America. I don't believe in God Bless America. I don't believe a higher power is standing beside us and guiding us. I don't believe we're being singled out. I believe much more in United We Stand. I have my doubts, but I want it to be true. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we really came together, if we really found a common humanity? The hitch is that you can't find a common humanity just because you have a common enemy. You have to find a common humanity because you believe that's true.

It's one thing to fall in love. It's another to feel someone else fall in love with you, and to feel a responsibility toward that love.

I am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me.

If you put enough closets together, you have enough space for a room. If you put enough rooms together, you have enough room for a house. If you put enough houses together, you have space for a town, then a city, then a nation, then a world.

There were so many other people in my life.I had spent all of my time listening,learning the longings we all have in common.I never took the time to hear them in myselfand I heard them speaking to him.The desire for desire, that hopefor hope, the possibility of everythingtruly possible. I had so many friends,so many nods and conversations,so many things I’d always wantedto say to someone.

What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease [AIDS] had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved.

The way you argued with me, you would have thought that we were debating the existence of God or whether or not we should move in together. These kinds of fights can never be won – even if you’re the victor, you’ve hurt the other person, and there has to be some loss associated with that.

I find my greatest strength in wanting to be strong and my greatest bravery in deciding to be brave....If there's no feeling of fear then there's no need for courage.

My face seems too square and my eyes too big, like I'm perpetually surprised, but there's nothing wrong with me that I can fix.

Every ounce of his soul tells him this will make a good story to tell his friends—an anecdote in the biography, an incident in the life. But part of the sorrow he feels—and it is that—comes from the distance he sees between himself and the storytelling, the hole that has ripped open between the here and the there.

It’s okay,” I tell her.“It is okay to be happy