Quotes from David Levithan

I want my books to have their own shelves," you said, and that's how I knew it would be okay to live together.

I fear you may have outmatched me, because now I find these words have nowhere to go. It's hard to answer a question you haven't been asked. It's hard to show that you tried unless you end up succeeding.

But I loved the notion that the night was mine to spend, and I immediately decided to spend it on you.

We have become—although I'd never say this out loud—something like a model couple. The secret? We like each other. I mean, we really like each other. We know when to keep our space and when to share it.

Up or down. We're you in an up or down?

You have to believe that the opposites reach for each other. I had to understand that when I was thinking I am lost, I was actually finding that I was lost. the two opposite things were true at the same time: found and lost.

What's the point of all this magic, if no one really knows how to use it? But I guess the same could be said about life. Which is another form of magic, only less showy.

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 person inside your head.

i have no idea why anyone would want to become a teacher. i mean, you have to spend the day with a group of kids who either hate your guts or are kissing up to you to get a good grade.

LOVE is one kind of abstraction ...

Sometimes I love it when we just lie on our backs, gaze off, stay still.

Really, he could be anywhere now, because he wants to be nowhere.

They have left the first stage of romance—the rhapsody of us. Where everything is you-me or me-you or a giddily tentative we. Now him and her are asserting themselves, each given a private, pensive depth. Within the rhapsody of us, Elijah could think, I don't really know you, but I will. Now he is not so sure.

Just because it's better now doesn't mean that it's always good.

i have to keep reminding myself that this is what i wanted - this is what everybody's supposed to want.

I'd thought I remembered her perfectly. But it is much better to see her imperfectly, to see something new every time she moves.

Living within the definition of his own truth, just like me. He knows who he wants to be. Most people our age don't have to do that. They stay within the realm of the easy. If you want to live within the definition of your own truth, you have to choose to go through the initially painful and ultimately comforting process of finding it.

We're going to have to play pretend, Sam says. He has no idea how good I am at playing pretend. But I guess that's a different kind of pretend, a pretend that can't be obvious. Here we revel in the pretend, laugh at it, become children within it. We walk rings around the carousel horses, trying to find our perfect steeds. We dangle at the bottom of the Ferris wheel and pretend that it is taking us up, up, up. I allow myself to relax. I allow myself to enjoy it. I even get lost in it.

In the long term, I can see how siblings could be helpful in life?someone to share family secrets with, someone of your own generation who knows if your memories are right or wrong, someone who sees you at eight and eighteen and forty-eight all at the once, and doesn't mind. I understand that. But in the short term, siblings are at best a hassle and at worst a terror.

As if that in some way made it better, that fate hadn't planned it weeks in advance.

Don't get trapped into thinking people are halves instead of wholes.

i think the idea of a 'mental health day' was invented by people who have no clue what it's like to have bad mental health

But isn't this a dance? Isn't all of this a dance? Isn't that what we do with words? Isn't that what we do when we talk, when we spar, when we make plans or leave it to chance? Some of it's choreographed. Some of the steps have been done for ages. And the rest—the rest is spontaneous. The rest has to be decided on the floor, in the moment, before the music ends.

I do believe that most of the times your life changes, you don't realize in the moment that it's on the cusp of being altered.