David Levithan quotes:

My main piece of advice would be don't worry about being published - just write a really good book, but also don't be afraid to write a bad book. Give yourself permission to fail, and don't be afraid.

when things break, it's not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. it's because a little piece gets lost -- the two remaining ends couldn't fit together even if they wanted to. the whole shape has changed.

Bad Girl!" She chided. "I'm pretty sure Boris is a boy," I said. "Oh, I know," Mrs. Basil E. assured me. "I just like to keep him confused," Then she and Boris headed off with my future.

I love bouncing my words off of someone else's, and the fact that writing a story with someone else guarantees you'll get something you never, ever would have written on your own.

All the quips in the world couldn't prevent Oscar Wilde from becoming a lovesick fool.

That's what makes it a good photograph. You think you know what's going on in her head. but the truth? No matter how good a photograph is, you can never tell what's going on in the person's mind. There's no way to get from here to there.

The dreamy guy at this Starbucks wasn't working the counter. Instead he was working a broom behind it, smiling as he swept. At first I didn't get the smile, but then I realized he was listening to the radio, to Norah Jones sliding her voice around he notes. In his own way, he was dancing alone."

And once again I think about how people use the devil as an alias for the things they fear. The cause and effect is backward. The devil doesn't make anyone do anything. People just do things and blame the devil after.

Deep down, you see, I long to be arcane, esoteric. I would love to confound people with their own language.

Ineffable, adj. these words will ultimately end up being the barest of reflections, devoid of the sensations words cannot convoy. 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.

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

After tiny has tried ballerina pose, swing-batter-batter pose, pump-up-the-jam pose, and top-of-the-mountain-sound-of-music pose in the reflection of the bean, he walks us to a bench overlooking lake shore drive.

One of my best friends is named David Leventhal, and it has always been a constant source of amusement to see how the similarity and differences play out in our lives.

People read vampire novels and say, 'Oh I want to read another vampire novel.' People read fantasy, and they're like, 'Oh I love fantasy.' I don't know that people are necessarily finishing 'Hunger Games' and immediately wanting to read another dystopian tale.

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."

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

Moms aren't the best audience for medication humor."

It was a laugh that came from the tip of his toes, gaining force and soul as it traveled through his body and out into the world in mirthful bursts. There wasn't anything fake about it; it was an amusement park of a laugh, and when it appeared, you wanted to jump on board.

The important thing is for the characters to feel real, and to be given the humanity they are due. That granting of humanity is what separates a full portrait from a stereotype.

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.

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.

the heart knows nothing except its own mind

I'm not good at relationshipsI always manage to find the flawssometimes in othersbut mostly my own.I foretell the ending then go and create the causesave myselfand end up alone

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.

X, n.Doesn't it strike you as strange that we have a letter in the alphabet that nobody uses? It represents one-twenty-sixth of the possibility of our language, and we let it languish. If you and I really, truly wanted to change the world, we'd invent more words that started with x."

All sorts of yayness floods my brain. Love is such a drug."

There are boys so enraptured by love that they can't get their hearts to slow down enough to get some rest, and other boys so damaged by love that they can't stop picking at their pain."

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

If you stare at the center of the universe, there is coldness there. A blankness. Ultimately, the universe doesn't care about us. Time doesn't care about us. That's why we have to care about each other.

breathtaking, adj. Those moments when we kiss and surrender for an hour before we say a single word.

The more kindness and justice are challenged, the more we must embrace them. Only when you are challenged - and only when you challenge yourself - do you discover what truly matters.

Love and I once had a great relationship, but I fear we've broken up. It cheated on me, wrecked my heart, and then went on to date other people. A lot of other people. And I can't stand to watch it, since love's going to cheat on them too.

I have no idea how he knows when I need him. We can go weeks without speaking, and then, when my blue moods threaten to turn black, he will show up and tell me my moods are azure indigo cerulean cobalt periwinkle and suddenly the blue will not seem so dark, more like the color of a noon-bright sky. He brings the sun.

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.

love is tied to truth. I think of them as unhappily conjoined twins.

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.

I close my eyes. And i scream. If my whole world is crashing down around me, then I am going to make the sound of the crashing. I want to scream until all my bones break.

What's the big deal with France? How come everyone wants to go there? Let me tell you about France. Their music sucks. Their movies suck. Their berets suck. Their croissants are pretty good, but the place overall still sucks.My family went there once on the way to visit Dad's homeland family. EuroDisney. Need I say more?

this is why we call people exes, I guess - because the paths that cross in the middle end up separating at the end. it's too easy to see an X as a cross-out. it's not, because there's no way to cross out something like that. the X is a diagram of two paths.

Even if you were green and had a beard and a male appendage between your legs. Even if your eyebrows were orange and you had a mole covering your entire cheek and a nose that poked me in the eye every time I kissed you. Even if you weighed seven hundred pounds and had hair the size of a Doberman under your arms. Even then, I would love you.

It's like you're a character in this book that everyone around you is writing, and suddenly you have to say, 'I'm sorry, but this role isn't right for me'. And you have to start writing your own life and doing your own thing.

My main piece of advice would be dont worry about being published - just write a really good book, but also dont be afraid to write a bad book. Give yourself permission to fail, and dont be afraid.

Maybe language is kind, giving us these double meanings. Maybe it's trying to teach us a lesson, that we can always be two things at once.

I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else.

People read vampire novels and say, Oh I want to read another vampire novel. People read fantasy, and theyre like, Oh I love fantasy. I dont know that people are necessarily finishing Hunger Games and immediately wanting to read another dystopian tale.

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

me: just don't ask about his forty-three ex-boyfriends, okay? or ask him about why he's carrying around an axe. mom:... me: i'm kidding about the axe part.

A guy can do far far worse than surrounding himself with people who restore his faith in humanity.

It is very hard to stay alive just for your own sake. It is very hard to stare into day after day without another familiar face staring back. It turns your heart into a purposeless muscle.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's this: We all want everything to be okay. We don't even wish so much for fantastic or marvelous or outstanding. We will happily settle for okay, because most of the time, okay is enough.

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

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.

There are many things that can keep you in a relationship," I say. "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.

He was my first boyfriend, and I made him my everything - he was my new life, my new love, my new compass point. I guess that's the danger with firsts - you lose all sense of proportion.

You existed. You existed now as a fractal. Definition: A fractal is generally a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be broken into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole. Maybe I was a fractal. Maybe the photographer was a fractal. Maybe we were all fractals.

Every you, every me. Fractals. Fractures.

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.

Game over," you say, and I don't know which I take more exception to-- the fact that you say its over, or the fact that you say it's a game.

I text tiny a minute later. MADE NEW GAY FRIEND. And he texts back PROGRESS!!!

Getting what you want is just as difficult as not getting what you want. Because then you have to figure out what to do with it instead of figuring out what to do without it.

me: why is it upset? shouldn't it be downset? gideon: i will file a lawsuit against the dictionaries first thing tomorrow morning. we're going to tear merriam a new asshole and throw webster inside of it.

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.

next to it was a dvd called 'as i get laid dying,' which had a hospital scene on the front. it was like grey's anatomy, only with less grey and more anatomy.

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.

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.

I am so used to hints and mixed messages, saying things that might mean what they sort of sound like they mean. Games and contests, roles and rituals, talking in twelve languages at once so the true words won't be so obvious. I am not used to a plainspoken, honest truth.

I want to write my life. I want to be able to write my life. You are a second away from saying it. You have no idea how much I love you.

I wonder if it's possible to start a new relationship without hurting someone else.

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

Even when I detach, I care. You can be separate from a thing and still care about it. If I wanted to detach completely, I would move my body away. I would stop the conversation midsentence. I would leave the bed. Instead, I hover over it for a second. I glance off in another direction. But I always glance back at you.

Ignorance is not bliss. Bliss is knowing the full meaning of what you have been given.

And still, for all the jealously, all the doubt, sometimes I will be struck with a kind of awe that we're together. That someone like me could find someone like you --- it renders me wordless. Because surely words would conspire against such luck, would protest the unlikelihood of such a turn of events.

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 never let things go unanswered for too long. Emails. Phone calls. Questions. As if you know the waiting is the hardest part for me.

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

Even though I'm seventeen, I guess I still thought this would always be true - that there would always be that lost-and-found, and not the lost-and-still-lost that I am now trapped inside.

You like him because he's a lost boy. Believe me, I've seen it happen before. But do you know what happens to girls who love lost boys? They become lost themselves. Without fail.

You know what happens to girls who loves lost boys? They become lost themselves.

They never played games with each other, they never had tow worry where they stood, because if either of them had a moment of wavering, the other would say I love you and would mean it and all doubts were forgiven because in this one case it was found that love conquers all.

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

If there wasn't a word for it, would we realize our masochism as much?

I had always felt that mittens were a few steps back on the evolutionary scale-- why, I wondered, would we want to make ourselves into a less agile version of lobster.

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.

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

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.

The terrorists-those nineteen people, with hundreds or maybe thousands behind them-did the worst thing you can possibly imagine. But tens of millions people did the right thing...On 9/11, all the hatred and murder could not compare with the weight of love, of bravery, of caring.

It was like everyone suddenly knew what mattered. Money didn't matter. Politics didn't matter. Tabloid news didn't matter. No-compassion mattered. Calm mattered. Respect mattered. Did it really take something of this magnitude to make us realize this?

I couldn't remember ordinary moments, only the ones that had made an impression. Ordinary moments were the ones that fell away first.

I kiss her and she finds the light switch and turns it off, and we're just lit in Pepsi-can colors and it's like we've finally found this other kind of conversation, this conversation in gestures and pulls and pushes and breaths and grasps and teases and glimmers and rubs and expectation.

Self-esteem can be so exhausting. I want to cut my hair, change my clothes, erase the pimple from the near-tip of my nose, and strengthen my upper-arm definition, all in the next hour.

I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I'm seeing we don't live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It's an infinite playlist.

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.

Long live protest songs, in whatever form they take.

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.

Every relationship has a hard part at the beginning. This is our hard part. It's not like a puzzle piece where there's an instant fit. With relationships, you have to shape the pieces on each end before they go perfectly together.

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

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.

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?

I know the odds are all against me and I know you might not feel this way too but I know I would rather die trying to know if I could mean something to you

A year. A thousand kisses. And now a thousand one, a thousand two. There are so many other place we could have ended up, but I have to believe none of them would have felt this right. "All I want is you" is not entirely true. I want so much more, and with you I think I can get it.

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

All this history...,' Danny says, then trails off. Lost in it. Feeling it connect. Realizing the weight of the world comes largely from its past.

I have never been given these wordsin this way before. This small piece ofgospel, three parts hosanna, two partstestimony, one part lamentation.

If you were a country," I said, "what would your national anthem be?"I meant a pre-existing song -- "What a Wonderful World" or "Que Sera, Sera" or something to make it a joke, like "Hey Ya!" ("I would like, more than anything else, for my nation to be shaken like a Polaroid picture.")

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

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

and when hecatches meoff guardand says'i love you'i catch himoff guardand say 'i need your help.

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

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

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

But I don't know when that day will arrive, and it would be too easy to forget to marvel at the beauty in this moment. In every moment.

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.

(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)

The truth feels different from other things. The closest you can come to describing it is that it feels like taking a perfect breath.

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.

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.

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.