Quotes by David Levithan

What separates us from the animals, what separates us from the chaos, is our ability to mourn people we’ve never met.

I find myself thinking back to something I saw on the local news about a year ago. A teen football player had died in a car accident. The cameras showed all his friends after the funeral—these big hulking guys, all in tears, saying, “I loved him. We all loved him so much.” I started crying, too, and I wondered if these guys had told the football player they loved him while he was alive, or whether it was only with death that this strange word, love, could be used. I vowed then and there that I would never hesitate to speak up to the people I loved. They deserved to know they gave meaning to my life. They deserved to know I thought the world of them.

In my kind of falling, there’s no landing. There’s only hitting the ground. Hard. Dead, or wanting to be dead. So the whole time you’re falling, it’s the worst feeling in the world. Because you feel you have no control over it. Because you know how it ends.

The word I think of is precarious. I am struck by how precarious it all is. How the things that hold us are only as strong as the faith we have in them.

We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust.Thats all we ask of you. Make more than dust.

An unarticulated crush is very different from an unrequited one, because at least with an unrequited crush you know what the hell youre doing, even if the other person isnt doing it back. An unarticulated crush is harder to grapple with, because its a crush that you havent even admitted to yourself. The romantic forces are all there -- you want to see him, you always notice him, you treat every word from him as if it weighs more than anyone elses. But you dont know why. You dont know that youre doing it. Youd follow him to the end of the earth without ever admitting that your feet were moving.

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

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 thats okay. Because you don;t know if you can get any better. Or maybe theres the irrational belief that it will get better even if you know he wont change.

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.

...Its just nice to see you out from his shadow. Because things dont grow in the shadows, you know? So it was frustrating to see you standing there...and really cool to see you step out of it. I dont know who this new guy is, but make sure when youre with him, youre not standing in his shadow. Stand where everyone can see you.

i want to say to her: i just want to be myself. and i want to be with someone whos just himself. thats all. i want to see through all the performance and all the pretending and get right to the truth.

flagrant, adj. I would be standing right there, and you would walk out of the bathroom without putting the cap back on the toothpaste.

Saving others is always more important than saving yourself. It has to be, or none of us would do any good.

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.

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

I dont have the heart to tell him thats the wrong way to think about the world. There will always be more questions Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.

The good old days needed a lot of improvement. People arent the only things that get better with age.

Boomer took bites of all six varieties, contemplating each one and guring out the order in which he would then eat them. “I like thebrown one and the lighter brown one and the almost-brown one. I’m not so sure about the minty one. But really, I think the lebkuchen spiceone is the best.”“The what?”“The lebkuchen spice one.” He held it up for me. “This one.”“You’re making that up. What’s a lebkuchen spice? It sounds like a cross between a Keebler elf and a stripper. Hello, my name eesLebkuchen Spice, and I vant to show you my cooooookies...”“Don’t be rude!” Boomer protested. As if the cookie might be offended.

In my mind, she was Lebkuchen Spice—ironic, Germanic, sexy, and off beat. And, mein Gott, the girl could bake a damn fine cookie … to the point that I wanted to answer her What do you want for Christmas? with a simple More cookies, please!But no. She warned me not to be a smart-ass, and while that answer was totally sincere, I was afraid she would think I was joking or,worse, kissing up.It was a hard question, especially if I had to batten down the sarcasm. I mean, there was the beauty pageant answer of world peace, although I’d probably have to render it in the beauty pageant spelling of world peas. I could play the boo-hoo orphan card and wish for my whole family to be together, but that was the last thing I wanted, especially at this late date.

Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.