David Levithan Quotes

Biography

Type: Writer, Editor

Born: September 7, 1972 (age 43), Short Hills,

Died:

David Levithan is an American young-adult fiction author and editor.] His first book, "Boy Meets Boy", was published by Knopf Books for Young Readers in 2003. He has written numerous works featuring strong male gay characters, most notably "Boy Meets Boy" and" Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List".

David Levithan Quotes

I want love to conquer all. But love can't conquer anything. It can't do anything on it's own.
It relies on us to do the conquering on its behalf.

We always see our worst selves. Our most vulnerable selves. We need someone else to get close enough to tell us we’re wrong. Someone we trust.

It scares me how hard it is to remember life before you. I can't even make the comparisons anymore, because my memories of that time have all the depth of a photograph. It seems foolish to play games of better and worse. It's simply a matter of is and is no longer.

Things that matter are not easy. Feelings of happiness are easy. Happiness is not. Flirting is easy. Love is not. Saying you’re friends is easy. Being friends is not.

Love doesn’t have to be on Valentine’s Day. It doesn’t have to be by the time you turn eighteen or thirty-three or fifty-nine. It doesn’t have to conform to whatever is usual. It doesn’t have to be kismet at once, or rhapsody by the third day.

It just has to be. In time. In place. In spirt.

It just has to be.

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.

The sound of the words as they're said is always different from the sound they make when they're heard, because the speaker hears some of the sound from the inside

The sound of words as they're said is always different from the sound they make when they're heard, because the speakers hears some of the sound from the inside.

I want to say more, but don't know what the words are supposed to be. I feel such a tenderness for these vulnerable night-time conversations, the way words take a different shape in the air when there's no light in the room.

The feeling that the world is full of people who think different is synonymous with wrong.

It’s a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn’t really care what you have to say.

misgivings, n.

Last night, I got up the courage to ask you if you regretted us.
"There are things I miss," you said. "But if I didn't have you, I'd miss more.

The way you're singing in your sleep
The way you look before you leap
The strange illusions that you keep
You don't know
But I'm noticing

The way your touch turns into arcs
The way you slide into the dark
The beating of my open heart
You don't know
But I'm noticing

It's one thing to fall in love. It's another to feel someone else fall in love with you, and to feel a responsibility toward that love.

abyss, n.

There are times when I doubt everything. When I regret everything you've taken from me, everything I've given you, and the waste of all the time I've spent on us.

The key to a successful relationship isn’t just in the words, it’s in the choice of punctuation. When you’re in love with someone, a well-placed question mark can be the difference between bliss and disaster, and a deeply respected period or a cleverly inserted ellipsis can prevent all kinds of exclamations.

It doesn't have to be on Valentine's Day. It doesn't have to be by the time you turn eighteen or thirty-three or fifty-nine. It doesn't have to conform to whatever is usual. It doesn't have to be kismet at once, or rhapsody by the third date.
It just has to be. In time. In place. In spirit.
It just has to be.

You know what’s a great metaphor for love? Sleeping beauty. Because you have to plow through this incredible thicket of thorns in order to get to beauty, and even then, when you get there, you still have to wake her up.
- Tiny Cooper

libidinous, adj.

I never understood why anyone would have sex on the floor. Until I was with you and I realized: you don't realize you're on the floor.

breathtaking, adj.

Those mornings when we kiss and surrender for an hour before we say a single word.

he is both the source of my happiness and the one i want to share it with.

abstraction, n.

Love is one kind of abstraction. And then there are those nights when I sleep alone, when I curl into a pillow that isn't you, when I hear the tiptoe sounds that aren't yours. It's not as if I can conjure you up completely. I must embrace the idea of you instead.

To love-to fall-is not a question.
To touch-to kiss-to speak-those are questions.

Because sometimes you just have to dance like a madman in the Self-Help section of your local bookstore.

Life goes on. Get over it. You're still young. It'll get better. Blah, Blah, Blah

You don't know me. You know one me, just like I know one you. And you can't know every me, and I can't know every you.

Do I really have to find a word for it? Can't it just be what it is?

Some days are like this. And the only way to get through them is to remember that they are only one day, and that every day ends.

We pencil-sketch our previous life so we can contrast it to the technicolor of the moment.

Once time is lit, it will burn whether or not you're breathing it in. Even after smoke becomes air, there is the memory of smoke. I am seeing as if by the light of a match, a glimpse of my life and having it feel right.

Music is everywhere. It’s in the air between us, waiting to be sung.

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

It is much harder to lie to someone's face.
But.
It is also much harder to tell the truth to someone's face.

He was attractive. I knew that. And I knew that attractive people always got away with things.

You know there's no such thing as a complete lie. There's always some truth in there.

...because if you can make yourself happy in the rain then you're doing pretty alright in life.

It's b******* to think of friendship and romance being different. They're not. They're just variations of the same love. Variatons of the same desire to be close.

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.

Love me less,but love me for a long time.

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.

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

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.

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

I hope suffering don't exist.

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.

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.

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.

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

is that what relationships become? A reduced version of the hurt, nothing else let in.

The word I think of is precarious. I am struck by how precarious it all is. How the things that hold us are only as strong as the faith we have in them.

How the things that hold us are only as strong as the faith we have in them-you go on the bridge because you trust it will not fall the fingers will clasp because we trust them to.

Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.

I told her about the time that I got so tired of you stealing the sheets that in my sleep-weary logic I decided that the thing to do was to tie them around my legs, knot and all, and how, when you attempted to steal them that night, you ended up yanking me into you, and I was so startled that I sprang up, tripped, and was nearly concussed.

We lost track of time because we felt like time had lost track of us.

I find my greatest strength in wanting to be strong and my greatest bravery in deciding to be brave....If there's no feeling of fear then there's no need for courage.

Feelings don’t follow rules. Guilt does. Fear does. But attraction? No way.

the thing about fear is that it defies the laws of rationality. It creates its own laws instead

What strange creatures we are, to find silence peaceful, when permanent silence is the thing we most dread

Reading is not life. Reading is creating life in your head.

Our friendship is made of bendy straws, long midnight letters,
my so-called life marathons, sleepless sleepovers, diner milk shakes, apron strings, a belief in beauty,
sucking helium, and the most trust I’ve ever felt for anyone, including myself.

Don't look at the package. Look at what's inside.

Hell, yes," Dev says, sitting up now. "Don't get me wrong - we're totally going to make the beast with two backs tonight. But if we do it right, it's going to feel like holding hands.

If you’re not able to laugh inside a sex shop,
then you probably shouldn’t be there.
I mean, they don’t call it fooling around for nothing.

Breath and heat and contact and shirts off and skin on skin and smiles and murmurs and the enormity revealing itself in the tiniest of gestures, the most delicate sensations.

A Cue from Nature

Run outside during a thunderstorm
That downpour, that conquered hesitation, that exhilaration
That’s what unlonely is like

The heart knows nothing except its own mind.

She had been lost on her own and I had been lost on my own, so it was natural that once we found each other we wanted to keep being unlost with each other. But that, at heart, had made us exist.

When the heart stops, you die. Love is everywhere that life is, and if there is no love for life, you die. Giving up on love is the same thing as giving up on life itself.

It might feel like the end of the world-
but it's the beginning of your art.

Whether keenly striking or laughably awful, contemporary art is rarely unentertaining.

When nothing else is left, art will become the truth of the time. Then people will get to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and wonder what happened - how we all became so imperfect.

Self-preservation isn't worth it if you can't live with the self you're preserving.

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.

breath is not aware of its history; it is just breath.
I wish I could be like that, or love could be like that.

I want you to be honest with me. Even if it hurts. Although I would prefer for it not to hurt. - A

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

People like to say being gay isn't like skin color, isn't anything physical. They tell us we always have the option of hiding.
But if that's true, why do they always find us?

That's what it felt like - that if I let a little of the hurt out, it would keep pouring out until I was a deflated balloon of a person, with a big monster of hurt in front of me.

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

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.

We come to a corner where there are a few people protesting the festivities. I don't understand this at all. It's like protesting the fact that some people are red-haired. In my experience, desire is desire, love is love.

If I didn't have music, I don't know if I could ever be truly happy, and if I didn't have these moments, I would never find music. It is everywhere, in the air between us, waiting to be sung.

That is all I need to make a room full of happiness-two boys, one love, and a song.

i am the ticking, i am the pulsing, i am underneath every part of this moment

My mother said I should have a 'change of scenery.' The word scenery made be think of a play. And as we were driving around, it made sense that way. Because no matter how much the scenery changed, we were still on the same stage.

I just mean that if we go through this thing and it changes us so much, you have to hope that it changes us for the better, right? If goodness can’t come from bad things, it makes bad things unbearable.

The devil doesn't make anyone do anything. People just do things and blame the devil after.

It’s hard being in the body of someone you don’t like, because you still have to respect it.

Some people are given relatively fair lives. But others-they carry the burden of the unfairness of the world.

There's no way for them to take away my sadness, but they can make sure I am not empty of all the other feelings.

I can take everything on her face at face value, and that's valuable in a friend.

We watch them grow, with sadness and amazement and fear. We have stepped away, but not entirely away. They know this. They sense it. We are no longer here, but we are not yet gone. And we will be like that for the rest of their lives.

We watch, and they surprise us.

We watch, and they surpass us.

This is the power of a kiss: It does not have the power to kill you. But it has the power to bring you to life.

In this space, in this moment, we are who we want to be. I am lucky, because for me that doesn’t take much courage. But for others, it takes a world of bravery to make it to the clearing.

Courage. I need courage. Because this is surely the stupidest idea in the history of guys liking girls.

and when he
catches me
off guard
and says
'i love you'
i catch him
off guard
and say 'i need your help.

Quería que el amor lo conquistase todo. Pero el amor no puede conquistarlo todo. No puede hacerlo todo por sí solo.
Ha de confiar en que seamos nosotros quienes conquistamos por él

Singing in the rain. I'm singing in the rain. And it's such a fucking glorious feeling.

Elijah is inexplicably moved by the broken columns and fragmented floors. He cannot help but find a meaning and a message in their poverty of stature. This is what remains, he thinks. It seems a valuable lesson on a day when card catalogs are dying, communications are deleted, and buildings crumble under the weight of society’s expectations.

What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease [AIDS] had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved.

No, really,' I said. 'I think she's great. And I honestly like her about twenty more times now than I did when we were dating. But love needs to have a future. And Sofia and I don't have a future. We've just had a good time sharing the present, that's all.

This is what a small victory feels like. It feels like a little surprise and a lot of relief. It makes the past feel lighter and the future seem even lighter than that, if only for a moment. It feels like rightness winning. It feels like possibility.

You can't know what it is like for us now-you will always be one step behind.

Be thankful for that.

You can't know what it was like for us then-you will always be one step ahead.

Be thankful for that, too.

tiny: but there is the word, this word phil wrayson taught me once: weltschmerz. it's the depression you feel when the world as it is does not line up with the world as you think it should be. i live in a big goddamned weltzschermz ocean, you know? and so do you.

still, what could i say? that i didn't just feel depressed - instead, it was like the depression was the core of me, of every part of me, from my mind to my bones? that if he got blue, i got black? that i hated those pills so much, because i knew how much i relied on them to live?

There are friends, but they are people to spend time with, not people to share time with. There's a false beast that takes the form of instinct and harps on the pointlessness of everything that happens.

look, tiny - i’m trying to be on my best behavior, but you have to understand - i’m always standing on the edge of something bad. and sometimes someone like you can make me look the other way, so that i don’t know how close i am to falling over. but i always end up turning my head. always.

Share Page

David Levithan Wiki

David Levithan At Amazon