David Levithan Quotes

Remember that at any given moment there are a thousand things you can love.

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

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

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

A photograph it a souvenir of a memory. It is not a moment. It is the looking at the photograph that becomes the moment. Your own moment.

The words that matter always stay.

motif, n. You don’t love me as much as I love you. You don’t love me as much as I love you. You don’t love me as much as I love you.

It was a mistake," you said. But the cruel thing was, it felt like the mistake was mine, for trusting you.

You have to believe there are kisses and laughs and risks worth taking.

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.

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.

why won't they leave me alone? don't they realize I have a tinder heart and a paper body and that any spark will turn me straight to ash?

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

We are so used to releasing words, we don't know what to do with them if they stay. No matter how many times we let them go, they come back. The words that matter always stay.

Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life. No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough.

Maybe relationships could have fractals, too. And maybe the sense of loss was when you're becoming a fractal of what you once were to each other.

I am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me.

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

detachment, n. Even when I detach, I care. You can be separate from a thing and still care about it.

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.

Once the storm comes out, the landscape changes. What you had before is altered in some way. And you have a choice: build something new and better from what is left or abandon it.

If you zoom close-if you get really close to someone, if you really get close to yourself-then you lose the other person, you lose yourself entirely. You get so close you can't see anything anymore.

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.

And maybe it is only by finding yourself that you can feel the true intensity of becoming close to another person.

There are all these moments you don't think you will survive. And then you survive.

If I'm not telling you something, it's for a reason. Just because you trust me, it doesn't mean I have to automatically trust you. Trust doesn't work like that.

you ask me what I'm looking for, and I outline you. you don't recognize the shape, offer other names. you say my time will come, and I hope.

I never felt the urge to jump off a bridge, but there are times I have wanted to jump out of my life, out of my skin.

People are rarely as attractive in reality as they are in the eyes of the people who are in love with them. Which is, I suppose, as it should be.

Do not just seek happiness for yourself. Seek happiness for all. Through kindness. Through mercy.

Happiness is so rarely a part of my vocabulary, because for me it's so fleeting

I guess I don't believe these things can ever be easy, although I also don't see why they have to be hard.

I am stronger than words and I am bigger than the box I'm in, and then I see her in the crowd and I fall apart.

We love and we feel and we try and we hope.

The mistake is thinking that there can be an antidote to the uncertainty.

Laughter rarely lasts longer than a few seconds, it's true. But how enjoyable those few seconds are.

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

I'll see you later, he says, and as he does, he runs his finger briefly over my wrist. It passes over me like air, and makes me shiver like a kiss.

I am a firm believer in serendipity- all the random pieces coming together in one wonderful moment, when suddenly you see what their purpose was all along.

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

Which is more stubborn, the love or the two arguing people caught within it?

You spend so much time, so much effort, trying to hold yourself together. And then everything falls apart anyway.

Every you, every me. Fractals. Fractures.

Please may this not be a game. Please may this not be a game. Because if it’s a game, I know I’m going to lose.

You think you know your possibilities. Then other people come into your life and suddenly there are so many more.

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.

this blue shirt i have is practically the same color as my jeans, and looking all-blue is something only cookie monster can pull off.

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.

It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored.

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