“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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“Reality depends upon your mind alone.[34] If your mind is not at peace what use are riches?”
― Kamo no Chōmei, quote from Hojoki: Ten Foot Square House
“On the morning of our second day, we were strolling down the Champs-Elysées when a bird shit on his head. ‘Did you know a bird’s shit on your head?’ I asked a block or two later.
Instinctively Katz put a hand to his head, looked at it in horror – he was always something of a sissy where excrement was concerned; I once saw him running through Greenwood Park in Des Moines like the figure in Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ just because he had inadvertently probed some dog shit with the tip of his finger – and with only a mumbled ‘Wait here’ walked with ramrod stiffness in the direction of our hotel. When he reappeared twenty minutes later he smelled overpoweringly of Brut aftershave and his hair was plastered down like a third-rate Spanish gigolo’s, but he appeared to have regained his composure. ‘I’m ready now,’ he announced.
Almost immediately another bird shit on his head. Only this time it really shit. I don’t want to get too graphic, in case you’re snacking or anything, but if you can imagine a pot of yoghurt upended onto his scalp, I think you’ll get the picture. ‘Gosh, Steve, that was one sick bird,’ I observed helpfully.
Katz was literally speechless. Without a word he turned and walked stiffly back to the hotel, ignoring the turning heads of passers-by. He was gone for nearly an hour. When at last he returned, he was wearing a windcheater with the hood up. ‘Just don’t say a word,’ he warned me and strode past. He never really warmed to Paris after that.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe
“The Dordogne in 1984 was the nadir. Diarrhea, moths like flying hamsters, the blowtorch heat. Awake at three in the morning on a damp and lumpy mattress. Then the storm. Like someone hammering sheets of tin. Lightning so bright it came through the pillow. In the morning sixty, seventy dead frogs turning slowly in the pool. And at the far end something larger and furrier, a cat perhaps, or the Franzetti's dog, which Katie was poking with a snorkel. (pg 53)”
― Mark Haddon, quote from A Spot of Bother
“Lord. Do not doubt His power.” Only the starets was allowed to address her with such informality. She was the Matushka, Little Mother; her husband, Nicholas II, the Batiushka, Little Father. It was how the peasantry viewed them—as stern parents. Everyone around her said Rasputin was a mere peasant himself. Perhaps so. But he alone could relieve Alexie’s suffering. This peasant from Siberia with his tangled beard, stinking body, and long greasy hair was heaven’s emissary. “God has refused to listen to my prayers, Father. He”
― Steve Berry, quote from The Romanov Prophecy
“Patty: I'll be the good guy.
Shermy: I'll be the bad guy.
Patty: What are you going to be, Charlie Brown?
Charlie Brown: I'll be sort of in-between; I'll be a hypocrite!”
― Charles M. Schulz, quote from The Complete Peanuts, Vol. 1: 1950-1952
Catch-22
Frankenstein
Dune
The Pillars of the E...
The Kite Runner
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