David Levithan

“Fuck you. This isn’t about slipping yourself an extra twenty dollars of Monopoly money. These are our lives. You went and broke our lives. You are so much worse than a cheater. You killed something. And you killed it when its back was turned.”

“I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces. I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live.”

“You like him because he's a lost boy. Believe me, I've seen it happen before. But do you know what happens to girls who love lost boys? They become lost themselves. Without fail.”

“People are rarely as attractive in reality as they are in the eyes of the people who are in love with them. Which is, I suppose, as it should be.”

“If you stare at the center of the universe, there is coldness there. A blankness. Ultimately, the universe doesn't care about us. Time doesn't care about us. That's why we have to care about each other.”

“There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.”

“Deep down? That sounds like settling to me. You shouldn't have to venture deep down in order to get to love.”

“It's like you're a character in this book that everyone around you is writing, and suddenly you have to say, 'I'm sorry, but this role isn't right for me'. And you have to start writing your own life and doing your own thing.”

“We always loved to say 'If I'd had a Monday-morning class, I never would have met you'. Or 'If you'd been reading something else, none of this would have happened'. We didn't believe in fate, but we believed in serendipity. We felt very lucky.”

“I had made it somewhere special, and I'd gotten there all on my own. Nobody had given it to me. Nobody had told me to do it. I'd climbed and climbed and climbed, and this was my reward. To watch over the world, and to be alone with myself. That, I found, was what I needed.”

“Are you a vegetarian?' I ask, based on the evidence in front of me.She nods.'Why?''Because I have this theory that when we die, every animal that we've eaten has a chance at eating us back. So if you're a carnivore and you add up all the animals you've eaten--well, that's a long time in purgatory, being chewed.''Really?'She laughs. 'No. I'm just sick of the question. I mean, I'm a vegetarian because I think it's wrong to eat other sentient creatures. And it sucks for the environment.”

“I have been to many religious services over the years. Each one I go to only reinforces my general impression that religions have much, much more in common than they like to admit. The beliefs are almost always the same; it's just that the histories are different. Everybody wants to believe in a higher power. Everybody wants to belong to something bigger than themselves, and everybody wants company in doing that. They want there to be a force of good on earth, and they want an incentive to be a part of that force. They want to be able to prove their belief and their belonging, through rituals and devotion. They want to touch the enormity.It's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren't a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an 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, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.”

“doodle, v.: I have more fun when it's freedom”

“How sad it must be for you to be nothing more than a hollow statue, to have your tomb preserved and your story forgotten.”

“These aren't two solos, this is a duet that isn't taking itself at all seriously.”

“A sound waiting to be a word.”

“If smart people are parodying it, that's a sure sign that some less smart people are believing it.”

“better, adj. and adv.Will it ever get better? It better. Will it ever get better? It better. Will it ever get better? It better.”

“She still dotted her i’s with full circles and felt genuinely thankful for every sunny day. I believed more in dark clouds, in sharp dots, in needing proof in order to feel trust.”

“But he can also be incredibly sweet. And I know that, deep down, I mean the world to him." "Deep down? That sounds like settling to me. You shouldn't have to venture deep down in order to get to love.”

“I was hurt. Of course I was hurt. But in a perverse way, I wasrelieved that you were the one who made the mistake. Itmade me worry less about myself.”

“After a while, you have to be at peace with the fact that you simple are”

“And still, for all the jealousy, all the doubt, sometimes I willbe struck with a kind of awe that we’re together.”

“buoyed notby thrill but by happiness.”

“It’s exhausting, trying to make a bad person act good. You can see why it’s so much easier for them to be bad.”

“I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I amlike the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that’s not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, eachwith his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.”

“The devil doesn’t make anyone do anything. People just do things and blame the devil after”

“I am kissing her for a reason that transcends want and need, that feels elemental to our existence, a molecular component on which ouruniverse will be built.”

“I am always amazed by people who know something is wrong but still insist on ignoring it, as if that will somehow make it goaway.”

“I realized that this was my life, and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t fight the tide, so Idecided to float along.”

“You just make up your mind and it happens.”

“Falling in love with someone doesn’tmean you know any better how they feel. It only means you know how you feel.”

“living life instead of just thinking about it.”

“no matter how hard it was to understand, she would be on my side. Fiercely.Unconditionally.”

“There’s much protest, but it falls on deaf ears.”

“The beliefs are almost always the same; it’s just that the histories are different. Everybody wants to believein a higher power. Everybody wants to belong to something bigger than themselves, and everybody wants company in doing that.”

“being with someone for over a year can meanthat you love them … but it can also mean you’re trapped.”

“when you lovesomeone, they become your reason.”

“I have been in the bodies of starvers and purgers, gluttons and addicts. They all think their actions make their lives more desirable. But the bodyalways defeats them in the end.”

“People take love’s continuity for granted, just as they take their body’s continuity for granted.”

“His features are attractive, but what he does with them is not.”

“Sometimes beauty is best when it’s distant.”

“In your heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading tothis, all the secret arrows were pointing here, the universe and time itself crafted this long ago, and you are just now realizing it, you are just nowarriving at the place you were always meant to be.”

“Dead is dead. For whatever reason. And in choice between life and death, there is no other choice.”

“I don't get this at all. It's like protesting the fact that some people are red-haired.”

“The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations - all of them rearranging themselves so this precise, remarkable intersection could happen. In your heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secret arrows were pointing here, the universe and time itself crafted this long ago, and you are just now realizing it, you are just now arriving at the place you were always meant to be.”

“If there's one thing I've learned, it's this: We all want everything to be okay. We don't even wish so much for fantastic or marvelous or outstanding. We will happily settle for okay, because most of the time, okay is enough.”

“When I was younger, I craved friendship and closeness. I make bonds without acknowledging how quickly and permanently they would break. I took people lives' personally. I felt their friends could be my friends, their parents could be their parents. But after awhile, I had to stop. It was too heartbreaking to live with too many separations.”

“In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love for 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.”

“That air. The air afterwards. I wanted to breathe it in. It felt right to breathe it in. Because we were breathing them in, weren't we? And the building. We were breathing it all in. And I thought, there's a part of this that's actually a part of me now. I now have that responsibility. I am alive, and I am breathing, and I can do the things this dust can't do.”