David Levithan

“I no longer think she's just being nice. 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.”

“This is the hard part about having best friends that I feel no attachment to -- I don't give them any benefit of the doubt. And being best friends is always about the benefit of the doubt.”

“Once you experience enormity, it lingers everywhere you look, and want to be every word you say.”

“I never have people tell me their stories. I usually have to figure them out myself. Because I know that if people tell me stories, they will expect them to be remembered. And I cannot guarantee that. There is no way to know if the stories stay after I'm gone. And how devastating would it be to confide in someone and have the confidence disappear? I don't want to be responsible for that.”

“There is a part of childhood that is childish, and a part that is sacred. Suddenly we are touching the sacred part -- running to the shoreline, feeling the first cold burst of water on our ankles, reaching into the tide to catch at shells before they ebb away from our fingers. We have returned to a world that is capable of glistening, and we are wading deeper within it.”

“The world, right now, is only us.”

“It is its own form of conversation -- you can learn a lot about people from the stories they tell, but you can also know them from the way they sing along, whether they like the windows up or down, if they live by the map or by the world, if they feel the pull of the ocean.”

“The unwarranted devotion. Putting up with the fear of being with the wrong person because you can't deal with the fear of being alone. The hope tinged with doubt, and the doubt tinged with hope. Every time I see these feelings in someone else's face, it weighs me down.”

“I stopped trying to figure it out a long time ago. I'm never going to figure it out,any more than a normal person will figure out his or her own existence. After a while, you have to be at peace with the fact that you simply are. There is no way to know why. You can have theories, but there will never be proof.”

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

“i am constantly telling him that i'm not sure the laws of sex and the city apply when there's no sex and there's no city, but then he looks at me like i'm throwing spiked darts at the heart-shaped helium balloons that populate his mind, so i let it go”

“wenn etwas zerbricht, dann ist es nicht das zerbrechen, was verhindert, dass sich alles wieder fügt. es liegt daran, dass ein stück verloren gegangen ist, und sei es auch noch so winzig - die beiden verbliebenen stücke passen einfach nicht mehr zueinander, egal was man versucht. die gesamte struktur hat sich verändert.”

“When I saw you today -- I didn't know I'd been waiting for you until you were there. And then all of the waiitng rushed through me in a second. That's something .... but I don't know if it's certainty.”

“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.... 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.”

“If I lose it now, I will lose you, too. I know that. I hate it.”

“It is always an act of desperation, and I keep asking, even though I know it will never work the way I want it to.”

“I have spent years of my life sitting in my room, creating defenses of cynicism, darkness, and bleakness. Jed's friendship is the skeleton key to my fortress. He disarms me every time.”

“You will always be my always", he assured me.”

“This is what my voice sounds likeI don't need to be talking to someone elseTo hear it”

“I know I should just leave. Just go. Because there's a point where a mistake turns into a big mistake, and I should probably come to my senses before I get there.”

“Part of growing up is making sure your sense of reality isn't entirely grounded in your own mind.”

“When first love ends, most people eventually know there will be more to come. They are not through with love. Love is not through with them. It will never be the same as the first, but it will be better in different ways.”

“I feel the universe is telling me something. And it doesn't even matter if it's true or not. What matters is that I feel it, and believe it.”

“If we actually thought about every decision we made, we'd be paralyzed ... You have to decide which decisions you're actually going to make, and then you have to let the rest of them go.”

“What do I know about love? Not much-that’s the safe answer. Even when I think I have a grasp on it, something comes along to make me realize I don’t know anything at all. It’s just a concept to me. It’s the thing that all the songs are written about, the thing that makes smart people act stupidly. If I can make love a concept, it makes me a better observer. And it also leaves a place inside of me hollow. Sometimes I can actually feel it. To reach down inside that part-I wonder how it would feel, to touch a void. That nameless empty.This makes me seem lonely, which isn’t really true. I have other parts of me—friendship, for one—which compensate for the void. I can’t feel the nothingness except in those rare times when there’s nothing else to feel.”

“I will be the one to leave you.”

“Wow, this puts the sweet in Sweet Jesus.”

“But I had a feeling I wasn't supposed to find her that way. She was not a needle. This was not a haystack. We were people, and people had ways of finding each other.”

“I still felt fondness for her - fondness, that pleasant, detached mix of admiration and sentiment, appreciation and nostalgia.”

“Now I read the updates on her online profile and she read mine, and that's what we were to each other.”

“we are holiday-only lapsed Catholics who support homosexuality and a woman's right to choose.”

“I preferred to hang out with the dead, dying, or desperate books - used we call them, in a way that we'd never call a person, unless we meant it cruelly”

“I wasn't as good at semi-normal conversation as I was at ones that were written down, or adrenalized in a surreal moment.”

“I love you,” she says.“I love you,” I say.And then we hang up, because nothing else needs to be said after that.I want to give Zara her life back. Even if I feel I deserve something like this, I don’t deserve it at her expense.”

“I haven’t been a good guest in Hugo’s life. I access his memories and discover that he and Austin first became boyfriends at this very celebration, a year ago this weekend. They’d been friends for a little while, but they’d never talked about how they felt. They were each afraid of ruining the friendship, and instead of making it better, their caution made everything awkward. So finally, as a pair of twentysomething men passed by holding hands, Austin said, “Hey, that could be us in ten years.”And Hugo said, “Or ten months.”And Austin said, “Or ten days.”And Hugo said, “Or ten minutes.”And Austin said, “Or ten seconds.”Then they each counted to ten, and held hands for the rest of the day.The start of it.Hugo would have remembered this.But I didn’t.”

“The tenderness between two people can turn the air tender, the room tender, time itself tender. As I step out of bed and slip on an oversize shirt, everything around me feels like it's the temperature of happiness.”

“Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen.”

“why won't they leave mealone?don't they realize Ihave atinder heartand apaper bodyand thatany sparkwill turn mestraight to ash?”

“I knowthe odds are all against meand I knowyou might not feel this way toobut I knowI would rather die tryingto knowif I could mean something to you”

“All I get is tomorrow.”

“I stole Judy Blume's 'Forever' from my sister when I was eight,' I say. 'I figured if it was by the author of 'Superfudge', it had to be good. Well, I soon realized why she kept it under her bed. I'm not sure I understood it all, but I thought it was unfair that the boy would name his, um, organ, and the girl wouldn't name hers. So I decided to give mine a name.' Rhiannon is laughing. "What was its name?' "Helena. I introduced everyone to her at dinner that night. It went over really well.”

“Putting up with the fear of being with the wrong person because you can't deal with the fear of being alone.”

“(Kindness) 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."-David Levithan (Every Day)”

“C'mon, Paul," she says. "We all know love makes you do stupid things.”

“But I want to feel like life matters. Ihad something real with you, but then the realness scared me. I decided to go for other things instead.”

“Someday your prince will come," I assure him."And the first thing I'm going to say to him is, 'What took you so long?”

“I learn about the highs and lows of living with the same mother for your entire life, about how no one can make you angrier, but how you can't really love anyone more.”

“When the shock wears off, you always hope there's understanding underneath.”

“It's goodbye to some things. And hello to others.”

“Even though it was hard to see you, it was good to see you.”