David Levithan Quotes

When you live as I do, you cannot indulge in jealousy. If you do, it will rip you apart.

~ David Levithan

Life goes on is a redundancy. Life is defined by its going on.

~ David Levithan

Now she’s lit by the warm orange spreading from the horizon as not-quite-day, becomes not-quite-night

~ David Levithan

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.

~ David Levithan

I will be the one to leave you.

~ David Levithan

He counts as an ex because he made me feel dumped even without making me feel loved first.

~ David Levithan

They have left the first stage of romance—the rhapsody of us. Where everything is you-me or me-you or a giddily tentative we. Now him and her are asserting themselves, each given a private, pensive depth. Within the rhapsody of us, Elijah could think, I don’t really know you, but I will. Now he is not so sure.

~ David Levithan

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

~ David Levithan

The way you argued with me, you would have thought that we were debating the existence of God or whether or not we should move in together. These kinds of fights can never be won – even if you’re the victor, you’ve hurt the other person, and there has to be some loss associated with that.

~ David Levithan

loss takes as much as love does, sometimes more

~ David Levithan

What a powerful word, future. Of all the abstractions we can articulate to ourselves, of all the concepts we have that other animals do not, how extraordinary the ability to consider a time that's never been experienced. And how tragic not to consider it. It galls us, we with such a limited future, to see someone brush it aside as meaningless, when it has an endless capacity for meaning, and an endless number of meanings that can be found within it.

~ David Levithan

the sadness will ebbthe trouble is the time it might take

~ David Levithan

I wanted love to conquer all. But love can't conquer anything.

~ David Levithan

But none of that really mattered. I had found my tribe. It felt like a family reunion for the family I'd never really known, a homecoming at the place where I was always meant to be nut hadn't known how to find.

~ David Levithan

There were so many other people in my life.I had spent all of my time listening,learning the longings we all have in common.I never took the time to hear them in myselfand I heard them speaking to him.The desire for desire, that hopefor hope, the possibility of everythingtruly possible. I had so many friends,so many nods and conversations,so many things I’d always wantedto say to someone.

~ David Levithan

What's the point of all this magic, if no one really knows how to use it? But I guess the same could be said about life. Which is another form of magic, only less showy.

~ David Levithan

We always underestimated our own participation in magic. That is, we thought of magic as something that existed with or without us. But that’s not true. Things are not magical because they’ve been conjured for us by some outside force. They are magical because we create them, and then deem them so. Ryan and Avery will say the first moment they spoke, the first moment they danced, was magical. But they were the ones—no one else, nothing else—who gave it the magic. We know. We were there. Ryan opened himself to it. Avery opened himself to it. And the act of opening was all they needed. That is the magic.

~ David Levithan

In an age of guidebooks, websites, and radio waves, discovery has nearly become a lost feeling. If anything, it is now a matter of expectations to surpass—rarely a matter of unexpected wonderment. It is unusual to find a situation that appears without word, or a place that was not known to be on the road.

~ David Levithan

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

~ David Levithan

Thoughts can follow you anywhere.

~ David Levithan

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

~ David Levithan

They are so caught up in their happiness that they don't realize I'm not really a part of it. I am wandering along the periphery. I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood. . . . There are moments I just sit in my frame, float in my tank, ride in my car and say nothing, think nothing that connects me to anything at all.

~ David Levithan

I didn't let her go. She went. It's not my fault.She did it.She could undo it. This is feeling so fucking famliar.Why do we even bother? Why do we make ourselves so open to such easy damage? Is it all loneliness? Is it all fear? Of is it just to experience those narcotic moments of belonging with someone else?

~ David Levithan

Maybe this is what alone really is — finding out how tiny your world is, and not knowing how to get anywhere else.

~ David Levithan

But I look into her eyes and she looks into my eyes and we recognize it—the excitement of being here, the excitement of being now. And maybe I’m realizing what a part of it she is and maybe she’s realizing what a part of it I am, because suddenly we’re not crashing as much as we’re combining. The chords swirling around us are becoming a tornado, and we are at the center of each other. My wrist touches hers right at the point of our pulses, and I swear I can feel it. That thrum. We are moving to the music and at the same time we are a stillness. I am not losing myself in the barrage. I am finding her. And she is—yes, she is finding me. The crowd is pressing in on us and the bassline is revealing everything and we are two people who are part of a lot more people, and at the same time we’re our own part. There isn’t loneliness, only this intense twoliness.

~ David Levithan

It is a sound like loneliness—enough to let you know you’re there, but not enough to fill you with life.

~ David Levithan

It is an awful thing to be betrayed by your body. And it's lonely, because you feel you can't talk about it. You feel it's something between you and the body. You feel it's a battle you will never win . . . and yet you fight it day after day, and it wears you down. Even if you try to ignore it, the energy it takes to ignore it will exhaust you.

~ David Levithan

I am jealous of anyone who can make other people care so much.

~ David Levithan

I had gotten so used to being alone, but never entirely used to it. Never used to it enough to stop wanting the alternative.

~ David Levithan

After a while, you have to be at peace with the fact that you simply are. There is no way to know why.

~ David Levithan

Tony knows the names of trees and birds. As we walk around, he points them out to me. I try to record them in my mind, but the information never holds. What matters to me is the emotional meaning of the objects.

~ David Levithan

So I get to be the bitch now? Fine. Then you, my friend, are the scary girl. 'He doesn't hit me. He doesn't abuse me. He doesn't cheat on me.' Can you hear yourself? If those are the standards you have--hey, he hasn't punched me, so everything must be okay!--that scares me. That makes me think that at some point you've used these justifications. 'Oh, it's really bad right now, and he's being awful...but at least he's not hitting me. Have a little more respect for yourself than that, okay?

~ David Levithan

My face seems too square and my eyes too big, like I'm perpetually surprised, but there's nothing wrong with me that I can fix.

~ David Levithan

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

~ David Levithan

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

~ David Levithan

In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love for a gender. I have fallen for individuals. I know this is hard for people to do, but I don’t understand why it’s so hard, when it’s so obvious.

~ David Levithan

No. I don't. You don't always have to be who they want you to be, you know.

~ David Levithan

We are young and the night is young. We are in the middle of somewhere and we are feeling everything.

~ David Levithan

Love, he thinks, is a lie that people tell each other in order to make the world bearable. He is not up for the lie anymore. And nobody is going to lie to him like that, anyway. He's not even worth a lie.

~ David Levithan

As soon as Neil is out of the shower, he texts Peter. You up? he asks.And the reply comes instantly:For anything.

~ David Levithan