David Levithan

“(well, LOVE and gay rights - three cheers for straight girls who max out on helping gay guys)”

“this is what i never allowed myself to need. and of course what i've been needing all along.”

“willyoupleasebequiet: are you ready?bluejeanbaby: for what?willyoupleasebequiet: the futurewillyoupleasebequiet: because i think it just started”

“his train could've gotten stuck in a tunnel or something. it's not unheard of. he's coming from ohio after all. people in ohio are late all the time.”

“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.”

“And as we drift into sleep, I feel something I’ve never felt before. A closeness that isn’t merely physical. A connection that defies the fact that we’ve only just met. A sensation that can only come from the most euphoric of feelings: belonging.”

“So there I was, hovering above everything I knew. 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.”

“There’s still a part of her that’s waiting for the twist, the moment when all of this pleasure will jackknife into pain.”

“It feels like we’ve stepped outside of time. Even though there is no such place.”

“I learn. Sometimes I am taught something I have already been taught in dozens of other classrooms. Sometimes I am taught something completely new. I have to access the body, access the mind and see what information it’s retained. And when I do, I learn. Knowledge is the only thing I take with me when I go.”

“There are many things that can keep you in a relationship. Fear of being alone, Fear of disrupting the arrangement of your life.A decision to settle for something that's okay. Because you don;t know if you can get any better. Or maybe there's the irrational belief that it will get better even if you know he won't change.”

“R: "I know that deep down, I mean the world to him." A: "Deep down? That sounds like settling to me. You shouldn't have to venture deep down in order to get to love.”

“The joy is in remembering; the pain is in knowing it was yesterday”

“I love you-I do-but I am afraid of making that love too important. Because you're always going to leave me, A. We can't deny it. You're always going to leave.”

“It won't be a normal life-I know that. But it will be a life. A life together.”

“Because when something happens, she's the person I want to tell. The most basic indicator of love.”

“I only have eyes for you.”

“I try to get the basic facts, not the details. The details can be interesting, but they can also distract me into attachment. The worst thing in the world would be to pretend to know the people whose lives I step through. They cannot be homes to me. They must be hotel rooms.”

“You make it a production. Slam doors. Knock things over. Scream. But I just leave. Even if I'm still standing there, I leave. I am refusing you. I am denying you. I am an adjective that is quickly turning into a noun.”

“The older I get, the more I lose my ability to breathe.”

“The brief transcript of moments, written on the body, is so deeply satisfying to read.”

“I feel such a tenderness for these vulnerable nighttime conversations, the way words take a different shape in the air when there's no light in the room.”

“Even if you were green and had a beard and a male appendage between your legs. Even if your eyebrows were orange and you had a mole covering your entire cheek and a nose that poked me in the eye every time I kissed you. Even if you weighed seven hundred pounds and had hair the size of a Doberman under your arms. Even then, I would love you.”

“You shouldn’t have to venture deep down in order to get to love.”

“And it doesn’t even matter if it’s true or not. What matters is that I feel it, and believe it.”

“Elijah is overwhelmed by the sheer fact of all the people who have walked over this very spot. As he watches Nikes and loafers glide past, he tries to fathom the feet of centuries ago. A person could stay in this same place his whole life and meet millions of people from all over the world. But instead, everyone moves on, and meets no one.”

“it's gonna hurt because it matters.”

“The clock always ticks. There are times you don't hear it, and there are times that you do.”

“I didn't tell any of my friends about our first date. I waited until after our second, because I wanted to make sure it was real. I wouldn't believe it had happened until it had happened again. Then, later on, I would be overwhelmed by the evidence, by all the lines connecting you to me, and us to love.”

“I am learning that a life isn't real unless someone else knows its reality. And I want my life to be real.”

“And just like that, the universe goes wrong. Just like that, all the enormity seems to shrink into a ball and float away from my reach. I feel it, and she doesn't. Or I feel it, and she won't.”

“It's as if when you love someone, they become your reason. And maybe I've gotten it backward, maybe it's just because I need a reason that I find myself falling in love with her. But I don't think that's it. I think I would have continued along, oblivious, if I hadn't happened to meet her.”

“I choose what to remember, and I am choosing Rhiannon. Again and again, I am choosing her, I am conjuring her, because to let go for an instant will allow her to disappear.”

“What is it about the moment you fall in love? How can such small measure of time contain such enormity?I suddenly realize why people believe in deja vu, why people believe they've lived past lives, because there is no way the years I've spent on this earth could possibly encapsulate what I'm feeling.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.”

“It was too heartbreaking to live with so many separations.”

“There is no word for the recipient of the love. There is only a word for the giver. There is the assumption that lovers come in pairs.”

“Gone is not forgotten, but our lives cannot be a memorial. This city cannot be a memorial. This city has to be a city. Our lives have to be our lives.”

“It was like everyone suddenly knew what mattered. Money didn't matter. Politics didn't matter. Tabloid news didn't matter. No-compassion mattered. Calm mattered. Respect mattered. Did it really take something of this magnitude to make us realize this?”

“I can see that the sadness has returned. And it's not a beautiful sadness- beautiful sadness is a myth. Sadness turns our features to clay, not porcelain.”

“But I think we were walking around like we were invincible. And maybe that's a bad way to live your life. Because you're not invincible. Nobody is. And maybe now that we've learned that, we'll be better.”

“I still don’t know if this is a good quality or a bad one, to be able to be in the moment and then step out of it.”

“If you're not a flaming Filipino dancing queen, they never, ever expect the Asian guy to be asking about gay sex. They always figure you want to talk about math. Or the violin.”

“I had a sense then of how if we truly understood how many of the unimportant things we do will end up outliving us, we'd never be able to go on.”

“There are few things harder than being born into the wrong body.”

“I hope that George doesn't internalize her scare tactics. I want to argue with her, tell her that "sins of the flesh" is just a control mechanism -- if you demonize a person's pleasure, then you can control his or her life. I can't say how many times this tool has been wielded against me, in a variety of forms. But I see no sin in a kiss. I only see sin in the condemnation.”

“Answerless questions can destroy you. Move on.”

“I am made for running. Because when you run, you could be anyone. You hone yourself into a body, nothing more or less than a body. You respond as a body, to the body. If you are racing to win, you have no thoughts but the body's thoughts, no goals but the body's goals. You obliterate yourself in the name of speed. You negate yourself in order to make it past the finish line.”

“Sometimes when you hit send, you can imagine the message going straight into the person's heart. But other times, like this time, it feels like the words are merely falling into a well.”

“This is the trap of having something to live for:Everything else seems lifeless.”

“I have become very good at clearing histories.”