Quotes from David Levithan

They had their beliefs, and those beliefs were stronger than any belief they had in him.

I find it hard to look at her. I know from experience that beneath every peripheral girl is a central truth.

Choose your actions wisely.

I only have a day to give—so why can't it be a good one? Why can't it be a shared one? Why can't I take the music of the moment and see how long it can last?

The body is the easiest thing to adjust to... It's the life, the context of the body, that can be hard to grasp.

I am trying not to think of what will happen next. I am trying not to think of endings.

We vote every time we make a choice. We vote with our lives.

We watch them grow, with sadness and amazement and fear. We have stepped away, but not entirely away. They know this. They sense it. We are no longer here, but we are not yet gone. And we will be like that for the rest of their lives. We watch, and they surprise us. We watch, and they surpass us.

We all have about 98 percent in common with each other. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.

The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations—all of them rearranging themselves so that this precise, remarkable intersection could happen.

The world was full of waistrels and waifs, sycophants and spies - all of whom put words to the wrong use, who made everything that was said or written suspect

Maybe fate's arithmetic is so diffuse that it's not arithmetic at all.

Everything is in its right place, and my heart wants to believe this can always be true. My heart wants to make it true, even as something darker tugs it away.

There are some days you know ahead of time are going to be important, but most of the important ones end up catching you by surprise. the best thing to do is to treat all your days well. Then see what happens.

It was after sex, when there was still heat and mostly breathing, when there was still touch and mostly thought... it was as if the whole world could be reduced to the sound of a single string being played, and the only thing this sound could make me think of was you.

Race is different purely as a social construction, not as inherent difference. And religion - whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that's different, most of the conflict in the world comes from that.

Covet, v. This is a difference between us: you desire what other people have, while I desire the things I used to have, or think I might have one day.

I was treating the past as if it could be mined for clues, for reasons. But the past resists that. It holds too much evidence of too many things.

I don't mean that God made this happen to teach us something. Or to teach me something. How monstrously selfish would that be? I just mean that if we go through this thing and it changes us so much, you have to hope that it changes us for the better, right? If goodness can't come from bad things, it makes bad things unbearable.

You grabbed my hand and twirled me around, two sidewalk sweethearts. Then, very earnestly, you stopped, leaned over, and whispered, You know, I'd get a tattoo with your name on it. Only, I want you to have the freedom to change your name if you want to.

one thing has always been consistent: Everyone wakes up tired. In truth, most of us go through the day tired, as if all of the information swirling through the air, all of the thoughts battling within our mind, leave us in a state of perpetual exhaustion. I don't know if it was always like this, but I'm pretty sure it's more like this now.

The feeling that the world is full of people who think different is synonymous with wrong.

All the words we use are stripped bare, so that no one ever knows what anyone else is saying, so that all kindness is cruelty, all selfishness generous, all care callous.

I realized I would always be missing something. That no matter what I did, I would always be missing something else. And the only way to live, the only way to be happy, was to make sure the things I didn't miss meant more to me than the things I missed. I had to think about what I wanted, outside the heat of wanting.