David Levithan

“But there’s something about her—the cities on her shoes, the flash of bravery, the unnecessary sadness—that makes me want to know what the word will be when it stops being a sound. I have spent years meeting people without ever knowing them, and on this morning, in this place, with this girl, I feel the faintest pull of wanting to know. And in a moment of either weakness or bravery on my own part, I decide to follow it. I decide to find out more.”

“And I, who have never thought in terms of a life, think to myself that I could make a life out of this.”

“School is school-she wants it to be over, but she's afraid of it being over, because then she'll have to figure out what comes next.”

“Every single answer starts with the phrase 'I don't know.' But most of the time she does know, if I give her the time and the space in which to answer.”

“As I step out of bed and slip on an oversize shirt, everything around me feels like it's the temperature of happiness.”

“She transforms once again into someone carefree, and I transform into someone whose only care is her.”

“Yesterday is another world. I want to go back there.”

“hurt tends to drown out sorry.”

“Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over.I know how wrong this is.When I was a child, I didn't understand. I would wake up in a new body and wouldn't comprehend why things felt muted, dimmer. Or the opposite--I'd be supercharged, unfocused, like a radio at top volume flipping quickly from station to station. Since I didn't have access to the body's emotions, I assumed the ones I was feeling were my own. Eventually, though, I realized these inclinations, these compulsions, were as much a part of the body as its eye color or its voice. Yes, the feelings themselves were intangible, amorphous, but the cause of the feelings was a matter of chemistry, biology.It is a hard cycle to conquer. The body is working against you. And because of this, you feel even more despair. Which only amplifies the imbalance. It takes uncommon strength to live with these things. But I have seen that strength over and over again.”

“You don't know, but I'm noticing.”

“There are friends, but they are people to spend time with, not people to share time with.”

“It daunted me that you were so beautiful, that you were so at ease in social situations, as if every room was heliotropic, with you at the center. And I guess it daunted you that I had so many more friends than you, that I could put my words together like this, on paper, and could sometimes conjure a certain sense out of things. The key is to never recognize these imbalances. To not let the dauntingness daunt us.”

“Life tells you to take the elevator, but love tells you to take the stairs.”

“It is easy for me to say it took me awhile to know. That is about as accurate as I can get. There were sneak previews of knowing, for sure. Instances that me feel, oh, this could be right. But the moment I shifted from a hope that needed to be proven to a certainty that would be continually challenged? There's no pinpointing that.”

“antsy, adj. I swore I would never take you to the opera again.”

“I was still trying to impress you, and I still wanted to be impressed by you, so I could pass along pieces of your impressiveness in stories to my friends, convincing myself this was possible.”

“We were painting by numbers, starting with the greens. Because that happened to be our favorite color. And this, we figured, had to mean something.”

“I'll go get the horse and buggy," you'll say. And I'll say, "But I thought we were taking the hovercraft?”

“Really, weren't these facts just placeholders until the long view could really assert itself?”

“She stays in the same spot, anchored by the profound, desperate loneliness of a bad relationship.”

“I've known this for a while, but you can know something for years without it really hitting you.”

“I'm a firm believer that every person, young or old, has at least one good story to tell.”

“When we embrace, one of us is always holding the other a little tighter.”

“There is no word for our kind of friendship. Two people who don'tsee each other a lot, but can make each other effortlessly happy”

“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.”

“Beautiful sadness is a myth. Sadness turns our features to clay, not porcelain.”

“She's being kind. Which is much more a sign of character than mere niceness. Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen.”

“I'm glad you're not mad at me," she says. "I just want everything to be okay."I nod. 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.”

“If there was no one else involved, it would be an easy choice. But isn't that always the case? And there's always someone else involved.”

“She loves the way Vic looks, using the world debonair instead of dapper.”

“You haven’t missed me for one fucking minute. You have never for one single second in your entire pathetic fucking life missed me. You might have missed fucking with my head, and you might have missed the satisfaction you so clearly got from demolishing me, but those are your emotions you’re missing, not mine. I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

“reservation, n.There are times when I worry that I've already lost myself. That is, that my self is so inseparable from being with you that if we were to separate, I would no longer be. I save this thought for when I feel the darkest discontent. I never meant to depend so much on someone else.”

“obstinate, adj. Sometimes it becomes a contest: Which is more stubborn, the love or the two arguing people caught within it?”

“gravity, n. I imagine you saved my life. And then I wonder if I'm just imagining it.”

“dissonance, n.Nights when I need to sleep and you can't. Days when I want to talk to you and you won't. Hours when every noise you make interferes with my silence. Weeks when there is a buzzing in the air, and we both pretend we don't hear it.”

“The minute I knew I was in love was the minute when there was no question about it. One night I was lying in the dark, looking at her looking at me, and it just was there, undeniable.”

“Love was to blame for this. Because when love ends, the cold is what you're left with.It was all I needed to feel.”

“Giving up on love is the same thing as giving up on life itself.”

“What i want is for what i want to actually matter.”

“The ocean makes its music; the wind does its dance. We hold on. At first we hold on to one another, but then it starts to feel like we are holding on to something even bigger than that. Greater.”

“It’s as simple as that. Simple and complicated, as most true things are.”

“The words that matter always stay.”

“I've worn black today, because I've heard so often that it's supposed to be slimming. But instead I am this sphere of darkness submarining through the halls.”

“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.”

“I am starting to get tired of relying on words. They are full of meaning, yes, but they lack sensation. Writing to her is not the same as seeing her face as she listens. hearing back from her is not the same as hearing her voice. I have always been grateful for technology, but now it feels as if there's a little hitch of separation woven into any digital interaction. I want to be there, and this scares me. All my usual disconnected comforts are bieng taken away, now that I see the greater comfort of presence.”

“I don't have the heart to tell him that's the wrong way to think about the world. There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.”

“My pride shut me up, my hurt shut me down, and together they ganged up on my hope and let her get away.”

“…Then it hits me.Maybe we’re the pieces,What?Maybe that’s it. With what you were talking about before. The world being broken. Maybe it isn’t that we’re supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we’re the pieces. Maybe, what we’re supposed to do is come together. That’s how we stop the breaking.Tikkun olam.”

“love is tied to truth. I think of them as unhappily conjoined twins.”

“I'm not Justin. Even if she doesn't know it.”