Quotes from Love Is the Higher Law

David Levithan ·  176 pages

Rating: (6.8K votes)


“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


About the author

David Levithan
Born place: in Short Hills, New Jersey
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Mansfield Park


“But dying's part of the wheel, right there next to being born. You can't pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that's the blessing.”
― Natalie Babbitt, quote from Tuck Everlasting


“I fell in love with her when we were together, then fell deeper in love with her in the years we were apart.”
― Nicholas Sparks, quote from Dear John


“Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina's delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat -- was, literally, talked into life.”
― Michael Chabon, quote from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay


“Antonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade - that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer...She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true...She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture...All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.”
― Willa Cather, quote from My Ántonia


Interesting books

The Black Arrow
(14.5K)
The Black Arrow
by Robert Louis Stevenson
It's Called a Breakup Because It's Broken: The Smart Girl's Break-Up Buddy
(8.9K)
It's Called a Breaku...
by Greg Behrendt
La casa de Bernarda Alba
(13.4K)
La casa de Bernarda...
by Federico García Lorca
The Last Little Blue Envelope
(21.1K)
The Last Little Blue...
by Maureen Johnson
Imagine: How Creativity Works
(25.8K)
Imagine: How Creativ...
by Jonah Lehrer
Goodbye Tsugumi
(6.7K)
Goodbye Tsugumi
by Banana Yoshimoto

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.