David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing
36 quotes
"We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust.That's all we ask of you. Make more than dust."
"Truces may stop the battles, but part of you will always feel like you're at war."
"We watch them grow, with sadness and amazement and fear. We have stepped away, but not entirely away. They know this. They sense it. We are no longer here, but we are not yet gone. And we will be like that for the rest of their lives.We watch, and they surprise us.We watch, and they surpass us."
"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."
"It's hard to think of such things when you are busy dreaming or loving or screwing. The context falls away."
"When you need to hold onto something, you should. Whatever gets you through, take it."
"What a wonderful word, future. Of all the abstractions we can articulate to ourselves, of all the concepts we have that other animals do not, how extraordinary the ability to consider a time that's never been experienced. And how tragic not to consider it. It galls us, we with such a limited future, to see someone brush it aside as meaningless, when it has an endless capacity for meaning, and an endless number of meanings that can be found within it."
"You can't know what it is like for us now--you will always be one step behind.Be thankful for that.You can't know what it was like for us then--you will always be one step ahead.Be thankful for that, too."
"What a powerful word, future. Of all the abstractions we can articulate to ourselves, of all the concepts we have that other animals do not, how extraordinary the ability to consider a time that's never been experienced. And how tragic not to consider it. It galls us, we with such a limited future, to see someone brush it aside as meaningless, when it has an endless capacity for meaning, and an endless number of meanings that can be found within it."
"I'm sorry," he says. "I don't usually like people. So when I do, part of me is really amused and the other part refuses to believe it's happening."
"As soon as Neil is out of the shower, he texts Peter. You up? he asks.And the reply comes instantly:For anything."
"Love, he thinks, is a lie that people tell each other in order to make the world bearable. He is not up for the lie anymore. And nobody is going to lie to him like that, anyway. He's not even worth a lie."
"But once upon a time - that would be our time - a telephone cord seemed like nothing less than a lifeline.It was your attachment to the outside world and, even more than that, your attachment to the people you loved, or wanted to love, or tried to love. Everything about it was fitting - the way it curled in on itself, the way it got so easily tangled, the way you could pull it only so far before it kept you in place.Twisted and knotted and essential."
"Max is a marvel to us. He will never have to come out because he will never have been kept in. Even though he has a mom and a dad, they made sure from the beginning to tell him that it didn't have to be a mom and a dad. It could be a mom and a mom, a dad and a dad, just a mom, or just a dad. When Max's early affections became clear, he didn't think twice about them. He doesn't see it as defining him. It is just a part of his definition."
"What strange creatures we are, to find silence peaceful, when permanent silence is the thing we most dread"
"Dreaming and loving and screwing. None of these are identities. Maybe when other people look at us, but not to ourselves. We are so much more complicated than that."
"Doubt is an acceptable risk for happiness."
"Just when we stopped wanting to kill ourselves, we started to die."
"People like to say being gay isn't like skin color, isn't anything physical. They tell us we always have the option of hiding.But if that's true, why do they always find us?"
"Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were."
"It’s a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn’t really care what you have to say."
"So what’s your story?” Ryan asks.Avery looks up at him, hand still in the water. “My story?”“Yeah. Everybody has at least one."
"It's Miranda who speaks up. "You're gay," she says, with complete seriousness. "And I love you."
"He plants himself right there in front of Craig’s mother and says, “You need to love him. I don’t care who you thought he was, or who you want him to be, you need to love him exactly as he is because your son is a remarkable human being. You have to understand that.”And Craig’s mother whispers back, “I know. I know."
"They wouldn't beat him up. They wouldn't break his ribs. He knew that. But they had other ways of breaking him - with silence, with disappointment, with disapproval."