“I couldn’t fight the tide, so Idecided to float along.”
— David Levithan
“tiny doesn’t just sing these words – he belts them. it’s like a parade coing out of his mouth. i have no doubt the words travel over lake michigan to most of canada and on to the north pole. the farmers of saskatchewan are crying. santa is turning to mrs. claus and saying ‘what the fuck is that? – will grayson”
— David Levithan
“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.”)”
— David Levithan
“If you want to live within the definition of your own truth, you have to choose to go through the painful process of finding it.”
— David Levithan
“I stop at the tune store, where I’m greeted by Javier and Jules. Half the store is Javier’s, half is Jules’s—they have entirely different musical tastes, so you have to know going in whether the tune you’re looking for is more like Javier or Jules. They have been together for more than twenty years, and today as they offer me cider and argue the blues, I want to ask them how they’ve done it. To be together with someone for twenty years seems like an eternity to me. I can’t seem to manage twenty days. Twenty weeks would be a stretch. How can they stand there behind the counter, spinning songs for each other day in and day out? How can they find things to say—how can they avoid saying things they’ll always regret? How do you stay together? I want to ask them, the same way I want to ask my happy parents, the same way I want to go up to old people and ask them ‘what is it like to live so long’?”
— David Levithan
“He doesn’t want to step out of the present, this present. Because once he does, there will be college applications and college acceptances (just one will do) and the last of everything (last class, last party, last night, last day, last goodbye), and then the world will change forever and he will go to college and eventually become an adult. That is not what he wants. He does not want those complications, that change. Not now.”
— David Levithan
“Betrayal. Lust. Secrecy. Devotion. I think we do these things to feel more alive. When the truth is that alive is alive — you can feel it in anything, if you give it a chance.”
— David Levithan
“The world is full of people who think different is synonymous with wrong.”
— David Levithan
“Let’s always love each other, and never be in love with each other.”
— David Levithan
“She is the weakness you think of as strength while I am the strength you have no idea is there.”
— David Levithan
“It is a horrible wonderful thing to be in love with you. To get to hear you sing for hour after hour but never be the subject of the song. To listen and listen and listen.”
— David Levithan
“The quiet times are the ones to hold on to.”
— David Levithan
“Having grown up here, I always wonder what it would be like to see this city as a tourist. Is it ever a disappointment? I have to believe that New York always lives up to its reputation. The buildings really are that tall. The lights really are that bright. There’s truly a story on every corner. But it still might be a shock. To realize you are just one story walking among millions. To not feel the bright lights even as they fill the air. To see the tall buildings and only feel a deep longing for the stars.”
— David Levithan
“I try to convince myself that it’s the alcohol talking. But alcohol can’t talk. It just sits there. It can’t even get itself out of the bottle.”
— David Levithan
“There is this book, Destroy All the Cars. It’s about how caring about something deeply can also make you hate the world, because the world can be really disappointing. But don’t worry– it’s also funny, too. Because that’s how you get through all the disappointment, right? You have to find it all funny.”
— David Levithan
“I read it a lot, whenever I find it in a library. Partly because I find new things every time I read it, but also because these BOOKS are always there for me. All of them are there for me. My life changes all the time, but books don’t change. My reading of them changes—I can bring new things to them each time. But the words are familiar words. The world is a place you’ve been before, and it welcomes you back.”
— David Levithan
“It might feel like the end of the world–but it’s the beginning of your art.”
— David Levithan
“Invoking the moral high ground somehow makes you lose it. Using a secret as a weapon makes you almost as bad as the transgressor.”
— David Levithan
“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. Yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at biology as a matter of percentage, there aren’t a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construct, not as an inherent difference. And religion – whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. 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.”
— David Levithan
“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.”
— David Levithan
“When I turned to look at you, I was afraid to move again—the moment was just too beautiful to be lost.”
— David Levithan
“I have never wanted a lover. In order to have a lover, I must go back to the root of the word. For I have never wanted a lover, but I have always wanted to love, and to be loved.”
— David Levithan
“I once asked Randy how he knew that he had fallen in love with his girlfriend, Amy, and he just looked at me like it was the hardest question in the world. I expected some floral, florid explanation, about the air lightening and flute music filling his ears. This relationship that had him so transfixed—I expected a masterpiece of sentiment, one that would make me so happy for him and so empty inside. Instead he just turned to me and said,“The minute I knew I was in love was the minute when there was no question about it. One night I was lying in the dark, looking at her looking at me, and it just was there, undeniable.”There is no question about it.”
— David Levithan
“I say good-bye to hope, but I also say good-bye to hope’s disappointment.”
— David Levithan
“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.”
— David Levithan
“All the quips in the world couldn’t prevent Oscar Wilde from becoming a lovesick fool.”
— David Levithan
“A Cue from NatureRun outside during a thunderstormThat downpour, that conquered hesitation, that exhilarationThat’s what unlonely is like”
— David Levithan
“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.”
— David Levithan
“The feeling that the world is full of people who think different is synonymous with wrong.”
— David Levithan
“I was always thinking in terms of too much or not enough, rarely allowing myself that crucial space in between. Except when he was around. Except when we were really together. Then I could forget—I couldn’t turn it off, but I could forget to turn it on. Gradually, the columns began to tip. I lost track of keeping track. In order to let us be, I let myself be.”
— David Levithan