David Levithan

“We didn't believe in fate, but we believed in serendipity. We felt very lucky.”

“Happiness is so rarely a part of my vocabulary, because for me it's so fleeting”

“i am so freaked out, you could pull a clown out of my ass and i wouldn't be at all surprised.”

“f you stare at the center of the universe, there is a 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”

“The past and future are what’s complicated. It’s the present that’s simple.”

“But I guess it's just as easy to get lost in the dealing as it is to get lost in the avoidance.”

“There is not one moment when that feeling of inadequate sorrow goes away. It just lessens and lessens, until it is mostly a memory of itself.”

“Most of the time I manage to forget to be afraid. But sometimes I think, 'This could be is,' and I move forward anyway.”

“We are retracing the lines and windows that are no longer there. We are rebuilding from our memory, trying to do with our eyes open what we usually do with our eyes closed.”

“I guess it's a choice we make," she said."What's a choice?" I asked.And she said, "How much of the world we let in.”

“She went on. "There's the drown of things and the swim of things, I guess. I've been going back and forth, back and forth. I feel the weight of it. And this bewilderment - how can something that doesn't have a form, doesn't have a definition, doesn't have words - how can it have such weight? And yet, there's the need to swim.""Life goes on," I offered."Yeah, but you see, 'Life goes on' is as a redundancy. Life is defined by its going on.”

“Bur I guess the thing about fear is that it defies the laws of rationality. It creates its own laws instead.”

“Here's what breaks us: Even if we know better, we still want everything to be all right”

“Years into days.Days into hours.Hours into minutes.Minutes into moments.Moments into possibility.”

“I wasn't thinking of marriage, just commitment.I wasn't thinking of forever, just reveling in now.We don't know yet how long we're meant to be-there are so many obstacles down the road.But there is also possibility; the ring marks the realm of possibility.”

“The most understandable thing in the world should be how minutes lead to hours, how hours lead to days, how days can make a year. And yet, this neat progression can still be surprising.”

“Intentar escribir sobre el amor es, en última instancia, lo mismo que intentar que un diccionario represente la vida. No importa cuántas palabras contenga, nunca serán suficientes.”

“I'm persnickety," I confessed. "Not, incidentally, to the point of being snarly. But still. Delightful and persnickety are not a common blend." "Do you want to know why I never married?" "The question wasn't at the top of my list," I admitted. The old woman made me meet her eye. "Listen to me; I never married because I was easily bored. It's an awful, self-defeating trait to have. It is much better to be too easily interested.”

“Family, like arsenic, works best in small doses...unless you prefer to die.”

“It feels like I am wasting time. I mean, that's always the case. My life doesn't add up to anything.”

“It's the way you say thank you like you're genuinely thankful. I have never met anyone else who does that on a regular basis.”

“Defunct, adj.You brought home a typewriter for me.”

“It's when you walk around the apartment in my boxers when you don't know I'm awake. And then that grin, when you do know I'm awake. You spend so much time in the morning making sure every hair is in place. But I have to tell you: I like it most like this, haphazard, sleep-strewn, disarrayed.”

“I wake up feverish, sore, uncomfortable.Is it sickness or is it heartbreak?I can't tell.The thermometer says I'm normal, but I'm clearly not.”

“---like the airwaves were taking a little longer to get here, so we could live in yesterday a little longer, even if it felt wrong.”

“Picking them up and reading them, I felt sadness do deep that it will never really be gone. It was a sobering moment-- sobering not because I was drunk, but because I felt like I was shifting into this new state of naked clarity. It was higher state of sobriety, a painful state of sobriety, because the truth was suddenly unvarnished, making me feel unvarnished.”

“I'm still upset with my mother, though. And scared.If you lose me, I remember her saying when I was little and we'd go to a department store, just let one of those salesladies know, and they will take you to where I can find you. Even though I'm seventeen, I guess I still thought this would always be true-- that there would always be that lost-and-found, and not the lost-and-still-lost that I am now trapped inside.”

“Her mind is an unquiet one, words and thoughts and impulses constantly crashing into each other.”

“There are times when I'm alone and I think, This is it. This is actually the natural state. All I need are my thoughts and my small acts of creation and my ability to go or do whatever I want to go or do. I am myself, and that is the point. Pairing is a social construction. It is by no means necessary for everyone to do it. Maybe I'm better like this. Maybe I could live my life in my own world, and then simply leave it when it's time to go.”

“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.”

“The had compatible silences.”

“You know what happens to girls who loves lost boys? They become lost themselves.”

“It was so much easier when I don't want anything. Not getting want you want want can make you cruel.”

“We pencil sketch our past lives so we can compare it to the Technicolor of the moment.”

“But when it seems insurmountable, I need reminders like this that you can get used to it. That it can take on the comfort of the right choice. That lasting things do, in fact, last.”

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

“I once told Amanda, my best friend in high school, that I could never be with someone who wasn’t excited by rainstorms. So when the first one came, it was a kind of test. It was one of those sudden storms, and when we left Radio City, we found hundreds of people skittishly sheltered under the overhang. “What should we do?” I asked.And you said, “Run!”So that's what we did - rocketing down Sixth Avenue, dashing around the rest of the post-concert crowd, splashing our tracks until our ankles were soaked. You took the lead, and I started to lose my sprint. But then you looked back, stopped, and waited for me to catch up, for me to take your hand, for us to continue to run in the rain, drenched and enchanted, my words to Amanda no longer feeling like a requirement, but a foretelling.”

“There is something so intimate about saying the truth out loud. There is something so intimate about hearing the truth said. There is something so intimate about sharing the truth, even if you are not entirely sure what it means.”

“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.”

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

“Your life is your life. You can't live it in compartments.Each place you're in has a door open at either end.”

“Once the storm comes out, the landscape changes. What you had before is altered in some way. And you have a choice: build something new and better from what is left or abandon it.”

“I will never have a photograph of her to carry around in my pocket. I will never have a letter in her handwriting, or a scrap-book of everything we've done. I will never share an apartment with her in the city. I will never know if we are listening to the same song at the same time. We will not grow old together. I will not be the person she calls when she's in trouble. She will not be the person I call when I have stories to tell. I will never be able to keep anything she's given to me.”

“Every relationship has a hard part at the beginning. This is our hard part. It's not like a puzzle piece where there's an instant fit. With relationships, you have to shape the pieces on each end before they go perfectly together.”

“But do you know what happens to girls who love lost boys? They become lost themselves. Without fail.”

“Beauty comes naturally, but it's hard to be stunning by accident.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I don't want to love her. I don't want to be in love. People take love's continuity for granted, just as they take their body's continuity for granted. They don't realize that the best thing about love is its regular presence. Once you can establish that, it's an added foundation to your life. But if you cannot have that regular presence, you only have the one foundation to support you, always.”

“Sometimes memory tricks you. Sometimes beauty is best when it's distant.”