Quotes By Author: david levithan

“flagrant, adj. I would be standing right there, and you would walk out of the bathroom without putting the cap back on the toothpaste.”

“i want to say to her: i just want to be myself. and i want to be with someone who’s just himself. that’s all. i want to see through all the performance and all the pretending and get right to the truth.”

“…It’s just nice to see you out from his shadow. Because things don’t grow in the shadows, you know? So it was frustrating to see you standing there…and really cool to see you step out of it. I don’t know who this new guy is, but make sure when you’re with him, you’re not standing in his shadow. Stand where everyone can see you.”

“Our moments are music, and sometimes – just sometimes – we can catch them and put them into some lasting form. If we didn’t have music, I don’t think we could ever be truly happy, and if we didn’t have special moments, we would never find music.”

“An unarticulated crush is very different from an unrequited one, because at least with an unrequited crush you know what the hell you’re doing, even if the other person isn’t doing it back. An unarticulated crush is harder to grapple with, because it’s a crush that you haven’t even admitted to yourself. The romantic forces are all there — you want to see him, you always notice him, you treat every word from him as if it weighs more than anyone else’s. But you don’t know why. You don’t know that you’re doing it. You’d follow him to the end of the earth without ever admitting that your feet were moving.”

“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.”

“Well, I agree that ‘trial and error’ is a pretty pessimistic name for it. And maybe that’s what it is most of the time. But I think the point is that it’s not just try-error. Most of the time, it’s try-error-try.”

“Indelible, adj.That first night, you took your finger and pointed to the top of my head, then traced a line between my eyes, down my nose, over my lips, my chin, my neck, to the center of my chest. It was so surprising. I knew I would never mimic it. That one gesture would be yours forever.”

“In my kind of falling, there’s no landing. There’s only hitting the ground. Hard. Dead, or wanting to be dead. So the whole time you’re falling, it’s the worst feeling in the world. Because you feel you have no control over it. Because you know how it ends.”

“I find myself thinking back to something I saw on the local news about a year ago. A teen football player had died in a car accident. The cameras showed all his friends after the funeral—these big hulking guys, all in tears, saying, “I loved him. We all loved him so much.” I started crying, too, and I wondered if these guys had told the football player they loved him while he was alive, or whether it was only with death that this strange word, love, could be used. I vowed then and there that I would never hesitate to speak up to the people I loved. They deserved to know they gave meaning to my life. They deserved to know I thought the world of them.”

“I hope suffering don’t exist.”

“What separates us from the animals, what separates us from the chaos, is our ability to mourn people we’ve never met.”

“But I think we both knew, even then, that what we had was something even more rare, and even more meaningful. I was going to be his friend, and was going to show him possibilities. And he, in turn, would become someone I could trust more than myself.”

“We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust.That’s all we ask of you. Make more than dust.”

“If this continues, if this goes on, then when I die, your memories of me will be my greatest accomplishment. You memories will be my most lasting impressions.”