David Levithan
I know there are epic tales of romance, where love means you're supposed to die. Where it's all about sacrifice. But I don't want to die. I don't want Stephen to die. I'm looking for the scenario where we both get to live. Where we can continue this marvel that is love and discovery and trust.Collection: Mean
The assumption of the word reunion is that, once you're together again, you are united. Two as one. Pulling close to someone is only a temporary symbol. It's the way you breathe with each other that's the telltale sign.Collection: Together Again
People say that time slips through our fingers like sand. What they don't acknowledge is that some of the sand sticks to the skin. These are memories that will remain, memories of the time when there was still time left.Collection: Life
With some break-ups, all you can think about afterwards is how badly it ended and how much the other person hurt you. With others, you become sentimental for the good times and lose track of what went wrong.Collection: Hurt
simon: that's disgusting! me: what's disgusting? simon: you know. you put your thing in the place where he, um, defecates.Collection: Disgusting
I text tiny a minute later. MADE NEW GAY FRIEND. And he texts back PROGRESS!!!Collection: Gay
The tenderness between two people can turn the air tender, the room tender, time itself tender. As I step out of bed and slip on an oversize shirt, everything around me feels like it's the temperature of happiness.Collection: Air
You can't actually have a romance between friends. That sort of defeats the definition of the word "romance." The word you're looking for is "love." It's a love between friends, just as there's also love between lovers, or possible lovers, or even ex-lovers. Same holds true for "bromance" - it's just a clever word used to avoid the word love, for straight boys who don't want that old-fashioned taint of gayness. Dudes, you love each other. Deal with it.Collection: Clever
There are times I think of us all and I wish we were back in second grade. Not really that young. But I wish it felt like second grade. I’m not saying everyone was friends back then. But we all got along. There were groups, but they didn’t really divide. At the end of the day, your class was your class, and you felt like you were a part of it. You had your friends and you had the other kids, but you didn’t really hate anyone longer than a couple of hours. Everybody got a birthday card. In second grade, we were all in it together. Now we’re all apart.Collection: Couple
When it all come down to it, the thing that matters most in a relationship is principles [...] We have the same idea what’s right and what’s wrong, and that’s got us through any number of things. If you can have that with someone, then you’re most of the way toward love. Not just lover-love. Any kind of love.Collection: Ideas
We walk into a bar, and you're aware of all the eyes on you. We walk into a bar, and I'm aware of all the eyes on you, too. For you, this translate into confidence. But me? All I can feel is doubt.Collection: Eye
I try to be a careful person. Most of the time my carelessness is completely unintentional.Collection: Trying
I had no idea what I wanted, only that I wanted something, which is the worst kind of wanting.Collection: Ideas
The boy I loved didn't know I existed. Then again, he was obsessed with Camus, so he didn't know if any of us existed.Collection: Boys
healthy, adj. There are times when I'm alone that I think, This is it. This is actually the natural state. All I need are my thoughts and my small acts of creation and my ability to go or do whatever I want to go or do. I am myself, and that is the point. Pairing is a social construction. It is by no means necessary for everyone to do it. Maybe I'm better like this. Maybe I could live my life in my own world, and then simply leave it when it's time to go.Collection: Mean
That lasting things do, in fact, last.Collection: Lasts
For I have never wanted a lover, but I have always wanted to love, and to be loved.Collection: Lovers
I want to take back at least half of the “I love you”s, because I didn’t mean them as much as the other ones.Collection: Love You
...and suddenly you started singing out your love for me. My name and everything, loud enough to reach the top floors of all the buildings. I should have told you to stop, but I didn’t want you to stop. I didn’t mind if your love for me woke people up. I didn’t mind if it somehow sneaked into their sleep.Collection: Sleep
Do you know when you cross against traffic? You look down the street and see a car coming, but you know you can get across before it gets to you. So even though there’s a DON’T WALK sign, you cross anyway. And there’s always a split second when you turn and see that car coming, and you know that if you don’t continue moving, it will all be over. That’s how I feel a lot of the time. I know I’ll make it across. I always make it across. But the car is always there, and I always stop to watch it coming.Collection: Moving
yearning n. and adj. At te core of this desire is the belief that everything can be perfect.Collection: Perfect
By the time I got there, you’d already decided. And I quickly decided to let you decide. You were already seeing the rooms as ours, and that was enough for me.Collection: Rooms
The key is to never recognize these imbalances. To not let the dauntingness daunt us.Collection: Keys
Even if neither of us got what we wanted, we found freedom in the third choices.Collection: Choices
I would always wait to take you home.Collection: Home
These words are now mine, but soon they’ll be ours.Collection: Mines
You leave the phone on beside you as you fall asleep. I sit in my bed and listen to your breathing, until I know you are safe, until I know you no longer need me for the night.Collection: Fall
And I told you: I think of a photograph you took of me, up in Montreal. You told me to jump in the air, so in the picture, my feet are off the ground. Later, I asked you why you wanted me to do that, and you told me it was the only way to get me to forget about the expression on my face. You were right. I am completely unposed, completely genuine. In my mind’s eye, I picture myself like that, reacting to you.Collection: Eye
So I said I wanted you to stay, even though nothing could stay the same.Collection: Said
After working for so long on being sure of each other, sure of this thing, suddenly we were unsure again.Collection: Long
What a strange phrase — –not seeing other people. As if it’s been constructed to be a lie. We see other people all the time. The question is what we do about it.Collection: Lying
I had forgotten this about love: how the simple things- the turn away, the turn towards- could be so complicated, and how the complicated things- the stolen night, the right words- could be so simple.Collection: Simple
I'm swimming in your cadences that you permeate my very language.Collection: Swimming
I wish I could remember the moment when I was a kid and I discovered that the letters linked into words, and that the words linked to real things. What a revelation that must have been. We don't have the words for it, since we hadn't yet learned the words. It must have been astonishing, to be given the key to the kingdom and see it turn in our hands so easily.Collection: Real
Yes, we could talk to you for days on end about all the bad first dates. Those are stories. Funny stories. Awkward stories. Stories we love to share, because by sharing them, we get something out of the hour or two we wasted on the wrong person. But that's all bad first dates are: short stories. Good first dates are more than short stories. They are first chapters. On a good first date, everything is springtime. And when a good first date becomes a relationship, the springtime lingers. Even after it's over, there can be springtime.Collection: Two
This is what you do now to give your day topography--scan the boxes, read the news, see the chain of your friends reporting about themselves, take the 140-character expository bursts and sift through for the information you need. It's a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn't really care what you have to say. The illusion of participation can sometimes lead to participation. But more often than not, it only leads to more illusion, dressed in the guise of reality.Collection: Character
The world is quieter now. It is never quiet, but it can get quieter. What strange creatures we are, to find silence peaceful, when permanent silence is the thing we most dread. Nighttime is not that. Nighttime still rustles, still creaks and whispers and trembles in its throat. It is not darkness we fear, but our own helplessness within it. How merciful to have been granted the other senses.Collection: Silence
Feeling someone else's anger is bad; being left alone is worse.Collection: Anger
The truth feels different from other things. The closest you can come to describing it is that it feels like taking a perfect breath.Collection: Perfect
I see no sin in a kiss. I only see sin in the condemnationCollection: Kissing
You wanna-I dunno-get coffee or something sometime?Collection: Coffee
"I want you to spend the night," you said. And it was definitely your phrasing that ensured it. If you had said, "Let's have sex," or "Let's go to my place," or even "I really want you," I'm not sure we would have gone quite as far as we did. But I loved the notion that the night was mine to spend, and I immediately decided to spend it with you.Collection: Sex
So what else can I tell you?" I asked. "I mean, to get you to reveal Lily to me.Collection: Honesty
There are things I miss," you said. "But if I didn't have you, I'd miss more.Collection: Relationship
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.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Girl
Such a strange thing, to hold a six-year-old's hand. Especially a six-year-old you've only just met. A toddler will grab hold of your finger, and someone your own age will clasp on to your whole hand, but with six-year-olds it's something in between, this acknowledgment that they can't be the one to take hold, so you have to do all the holding, folding your hand around theirs, feeling so much bigger and responsible.Collection: Hands
There is no such thing as equality for some. Equality must be for all. That is what freedom is. That is what liberty is. No human being is born more or less important than any other. How can we allow ourselves to forget that? What simpler truth is there?Collection: Book
There is no reason that we should ever be ashamed of our bodies or ashamed of our love.Collection: Body