Quotes from David Levithan

So what do you have to confess now? I don't know why I'm saying any of this, except that is the truth. I'm confessing that I don't know if I'm ready for this. What is 'this'? Being open. Being hurt. Liking. Not being liked. Seeing the flicker on. Seeing the flicker off. Leaping. Falling. Crashing.

I am not dangerous. Only the stories are dangerous. Only the fictions we create, especially when they become expectations.

I wish I could remember the moment when I was a kid and I discovered that the letters linked into words, and that the words linked to real things. What a revelation that must have been. We don't have the words for it, since we hadn't yet learned the words. It must have been astonishing, to be given the key to the kingdom and see it turn in our hands so easily.

She is my first and only love. Most people know that their first love will not be their only love. But for me, she is both.

It felt good to be surrounded by books, by all this solid knowledge, by these objects that could be ripped page by page but couldn't be torn if the pages all held together.

gothblood4567: 'sup? finalwill: i'm working. gothblood4567 on what? finalwill: my suicide note. i can't figure out how to end it. gothblood4567: lol

If goodness can't come from bad things, it makes bad things unbearable.

Breathing, n You had asthma as a child, had to carry around an inhaler. But when you grew older, it went away. You could run for miles and it was fine. Sometimes I worry that this is happening to me in reverse. The older I get, the more I lose my ability to breathe.

and when he catches me off guard and says 'i love you' i catch him off guard and say 'i need your help.

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.

A photograph it a souvenir of a memory. It is not a moment. It is the looking at the photograph that becomes the moment. Your own moment.

But there was something about you that made me think of sparks and motion.

vagary, n. The mistake is in thinking there can be an antidote to the uncertainty.

Please may this not be a game. Please may this not be a game. Because if it's a game, I know I'm going to lose.

I know I should just leave. Just go. Because there's a point where a mistake turns into a big mistake, and I should probably come to my senses before I get there.

We hold hands as we walk through town. If anybody notices, nobody cares. I know we all like to think of the heart as the center of the body but at this moment, every conscious part of me is in the hand that he holds. It is through that hand, that feeling, that I experience everything else.

When you break someone's heart, you also break yours.

Because that's the thing about mean people: They make you think that the world will never work, that there are divides that you will fall into if you approach. It takes a whole lot of good people to fill in the breach created by a single mean one.

You can't know what it is like for us now--you will always be one step behind. Be thankful for that. You can't know what it was like for us then--you will always be one step ahead. Be thankful for that, too.

I read it a lot, whenever I find it in a library. Partly because I find new things every time I read it, but also because these books are always there for me. All of them are there for me. My life changes all the time, but books don't change. Your reading of them changes--you 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.

You have a responsibility to your future self, who is someone you might not even know, might not even understand yet. Because until you die, that future self has as much of a life as you do. [...] Your life is not disposable.

I think about how people use the devil as an alias for the things they fear. The cause and effect is backward. The devil doesn't make anyone do anything. People just do things and blame the devil after.

I don't want to know anything, and I want to know it all

I had always felt that mittens were a few steps back on the evolutionary scale-- why, I wondered, would we want to make ourselves into a less agile version of lobster.