Quotes: Every Day by David Levithan

I’m supposed to review Every Day by David Levithan but then I realized I can’t possibly include all the lovely quotes from the book in my review. And since I don’t want to skip sharing David Levithan’s lovely passages and poignant messages to all of you, I decided to revive one of the blog features here, Quotes. This particular blog feature is a collection of quotations or author’s words from a specific book that I collect/compiled for the purpose of easily going back when I feel reading them again.

Just to be clear, this isn’t a meme that I will be doing every week. Even there are lots of books worth quoting, I don’t want to clutter my blog with regular meme post. After all I’m not good in following regular post schedule. I still blog when I feel blogging and I don’t have set of rules in here. I’m not good in following rules anyway.

Normally I only compiled quotes or passages from a single book in each blog post under this feature. Most of the passages were chosen because of their wisdom and thought-provoking ideas. Below are some of the quotes I personally chose that I think will somehow give you different views of life and love. Also, just so everyone know, I’ll be reviewing Every Day here on the blog even I am already featuring the book in his post. So watch out for that.

LIFE

“We all want everything to be okay. We don’t even wish so much for fantastic or marvelous or outstanding. We will happily settle for okay, because most of the time, okay is enough.”

“I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces. I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live.”

“I am learning that a life isn’t real unless someone else knows its reality.”

“Self-preservation isn’t worth it if you can’t live with the self you’re preserving.”

“This is the trap of having something to live for: Everything else seems lifeless.“

“Part of growing up is making sure your sense of reality isn’t entirely grounded in your own mind.”

“There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.”

“I no longer think she is just being nice. She’s being kind. Which is much more a sign of character than mere niceness. Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen.”

“The clock always ticks. There are times you don’t hear it, and there are times that you do.”

“If you stare at the center of the universe, there is coldness there. A blankness. Ultimately, the universe doesn’t care about us. Time doesn’t care about us. That’s why we have to care about each other.”

“It’s only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren’t a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion–whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that’s different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.”

“If smart people are parodying it, that’s a sure sign that some less smart people are believing it.”

“I feel the universe is telling me something. And it doesn’t even matter if it’s true or not. What matters is that I feel it, and believe it.”

“There comes a time when the body takes over the life. There comes a time when the body’s urges, the body’s needs, dictate the life. You have no idea you are giving the body the key. But you hand it over. And then it’s in control. You mess with the wiring and the wiring takes charge.”

“It was so much easier when I didn’t want anything. Not getting what you want can make you cruel.”

“If you want to live within the definition of your own truth, you have to choose to go through the initially painful and ultimately uncomfortable process of finding it.”

“And once again I think about how people use the devil as an alias for the things they fear. The cause and effect is backward. The devil doesn’t make anyone do anything. People just do things and blame the devil after.”

“I find faith in human perseverance, even as the universe throws challenge after challenge our way.”

LOVE

“This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.”

“Sometimes memory tricks you. Sometimes beauty is best when it’s distant.”

“Every relationship has a hard part. It’s not like a puzzle piece here there’s an instant fit. With relationships, you have to shape the pieces on each end before they go perfectly together.“

“I wanted love to conquer all. But love can’t conquer anything. It can’t do anything on its own. It relies on us to do the conquering on its behalf.”

“The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations – all of them rearranging themselves so this precise, remarkable intersection could happen. In your heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secret arrows were pointing here, the universe and time itself crafted this long ago, and you are just now realizing it, you are just now arriving at the place you were always meant to be.”

“I am always amazed by people who know something is wrong but still insist on ignoring it, as if that will somehow make it go away. They spare themselves the confrontation, but end up boiling resentment anyway.”

“The unwarranted devotion. Putting up with the fear of being with the wrong person because you can’t deal with the fear of being alone. The hope tinged with doubt, and the doubt tinged with hope. Every time I see these feelings in someone else’s face, it weighs me down.”

“There are many things that can keep you in a relationship… Fear of being alone. Fear of disrupting the arrangement of your life. A decision to settle for something that’s okay, because you don’t know if you can get any better. Or maybe there’s the irrational belief that it will get better, even if you know he won’t change.”

“You like him because he’s a lost boy. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen before. But do you know what happens to girls who love lost boys? They become lost themselves. Without fail.”

“When first love ends, most people eventually know there will be more to come. They are not through with love. Love is not through with them. It will never be the same as the first, but it will be better in different ways.”

“People take love’s continuity for granted, just as they take their body’s continuity for granted. They don’t realize that the best thing about love is its regular presence. Once you can establish that, it’s an added foundation to your life.”