“There's no way for them to take away my sadness, but they can make sure I am not empty of all the other feelings.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“I had no idea what I wanted, only that I wanted something, which is the worst kind of wanting.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“I want to have faith in strangers. I want to have faith in what we're all going to do next. But I'm worried. I see things shifting from United We Stand to God Bless America. I don't believe in God Bless America. I don't believe a higher power is standing beside us and guiding us. I don't believe we're being singled out. I believe much more in United We Stand. I have my doubts, but I want it to be true. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we really came together, if we really found a common humanity? The hitch is that you can't find a common humanity just because you have a common enemy. You have to find a common humanity because you believe that's true. ”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“Here's what breaks us: Even though we know better, we still want everything to be all right.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“If you start the day reading the obituaries, you live your day a little differently.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“We love and we feel and we try and we hope.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“The secret to living long is to have something to live for.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“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.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“Breathing is hard. When you cry so much, it makes you realize that breathing is hard.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“Life goes on is a redundancy. Life is defined by its going on.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“How amazing it is that friendships can become so full that you can't imagine what your life was like before them.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“If goodness can't come from bad things, it makes bad things unbearable.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“I don’t want to know anything, and I want to know it all”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“I guess it's a choice we make," she said.
"What's a choice?" I asked.
And she said, "How much of the world we let in.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“This is what a memorial is: standing still, staring at something that isn’t ther”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“Gone is not forgotten, but our lives cannot be a memorial. This city cannot be a memorial. This city has to be a city. Our lives have to be our lives.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“But I think we were walking around like we were invincible. And maybe that's a bad way to live your life. Because you're not invincible. Nobody is. And maybe now that we've learned that, we'll be better.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“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?”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“It will affect me in ways I can't even begin to get my mind around. This day is a dark crater. There is no room for songs. The songs are wrong. Every song is wrong. And I don't know what to do without music.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“This, I think, is how people survive: Even when horrible things have been done to us, we can still find gratitude in one another.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“I think that if you were somehow able to measure the weight of human kindness, it would have weighed more on 9/11 than it ever had. On 9/11, all the hatred and murder could not compare with the weight of love, of bravery, of caring. I have to believe that.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“Maybe there's a way to keep us in this moment. Not the sad part. But the coming together part.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“This isn't even something I've feared, because I never knew it was a possibility.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“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.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“We just want to walk. Our legs need to move to keep our minds from collapsing.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“This is what a memorial is: Standing still, staring at something that isn't there.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“That air. The air afterwards. I wanted to breathe it in. It felt right to breathe it in. Because we were breathing them in, weren't we? And the building. We were breathing it all in. And I thought, there's a part of this that's actually a part of me now. I now have that responsibility. I am alive, and I am breathing, and I can do the things this dust can't do.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“In Sliding Doors, the whole idea is that every choice you make, and every single thing that happens to you changes the trajectory of your life, and once you are put on that trajectory, there is no way back. But Groundhog Day - which, I tell him, also happens to be a much better movie - says the opposite. It says if you mess up or make the wrong choice, you just have to keep at it until you do it right.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
“I had a sense then of how if we truly understood how many of the unimportant things we do will end up outliving us, we'd never be able to go on.”
― David Levithan, quote from Love Is the Higher Law
David Levithan
Born place: in Short Hills, New Jersey
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“Fortunately, getting hold of people’s garbage was a cinch. Indian detectives were much luckier than their counterparts in, say, America, who were forever rooting around in people’s dustbins down dark, seedy alleyways. In India, one could simply purchase an individual’s trash on the open market. All you had to do was befriend the right rag picker. Tens of thousands of untouchables of all ages still worked as unofficial dustmen and women across the country. Every morning, they came pushing their barrows, calling, “Kooray Wallah!” and took away all the household rubbish. In the colony’s open rubbish dump, surrounded by cows, goats, dogs and crows, they would sift through piles of stinking muck by hand, separating biodegradable waste from the plastic wrappers, aluminium foil, tin cans and glass bottles.”
― Tarquin Hall, quote from The Case of the Missing Servant
“When we look back, it becomes clear that the acts and accomplishments of human beings are the signatures of history. Human signatures have created an enormous chasm between the joyeous light of the age of the Renaissance to the dark shadow of September 11, 2001. Those of us living on that fateful day experienced the lower depths of mankind. As an author, avid reader, world traveler, and person of enormous curiosity, my life experiences have taught me that discord often erupts from a lack of knowledge and education. To discourage future dark moments, I believe we must nourish the minds of our young with learning that creates understanding between ethnic and religious groups. Perhaps understanding will lead to a marvelous day when we take a last fleeting look at violence so harmful to so many. I sincerely believe that nothing will further the cause of peace more than the education of our young. I would like for readers to know that a percentage of the profits from the sale of this book will be devoted to the cause of education.
May all roads lead to peace.”
― Jean Sasson, quote from Growing Up Bin Laden: Osama's Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World
“Ignorance has never been the problem. The problem was and continues to be unexamined confidence in western civilization and the unwarranted certainty of Christianity. And arrogance. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the past by the present, but it is also necessary.
If nothing else, an examination of the past—and of the present, for that matter—can be instructive. It shows us that there is little shelter and little gain for Native peoples in doing nothing. So long as we possess one element of sovereignty, so long as we possess one parcel of land, North America will come for us, and the question we have to face is how badly we wish to continue to pursue the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination. How important is it for us to maintain protected communal homelands? Are our traditions and languages worth the cost of carrying on the fight? Certainly the easier and more expedient option is simply to step away from who we are and who we wish to be, sell what we have for cash, and sink into the stewpot of North America.
With the rest of the bones.
No matter how you frame Native history, the one inescapable constant is that Native people in North America have lost much. We’ve given away a great deal, we’ve had a great deal taken from us, and, if we are not careful, we will continue to lose parts of ourselves—as Indians, as Cree, as Blackfoot, as Navajo, as Inuit—with each generation. But this need not happen. Native cultures aren’t static. They’re dynamic, adaptive, and flexible, and for many of us, the modern variations of older tribal traditions continue to provide order, satisfaction, identity, and value in our lives. More than that, in the five hundred years of European occupation, Native cultures have already proven themselves to be remarkably tenacious and resilient.
Okay.
That was heroic and uncomfortably inspirational, wasn’t it? Poignant, even. You can almost hear the trumpets and the violins. And that kind of romance is not what we need. It serves no one, and the cost to maintain it is too high.
So, let’s agree that Indians are not special. We’re not … mystical. I’m fine with that. Yes, a great many Native people have a long-standing relationship with the natural world. But that relationship is equally available to non-Natives, should they choose to embrace it. The fact of Native existence is that we live modern lives informed by traditional values and contemporary realities and that we wish to live those lives on our terms.”
― Thomas King, quote from The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
“I fucking loved him and I hated it. I hated him for making me love him. I hated Kyle for leaving me alone so many nights for so many years. And mostly I just hated myself for doing this to all of us.”
― Adriane Leigh, quote from The Mourning After
“Grief is a hard mistress to have, Rome. She eventually wants all you have to give her.”
― Jay Crownover, quote from Rome
Tropic of Capricorn![What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]](/i/book/md/2/11/6313.jpg)
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