David Levithan Quotes

We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are.

When I cry - when I let myself cry - that's who I cry for. I don't cry for myself. I cry for the Cassie that's gone. And I wonder what that Cassie would think of me. The Cassie who kills.

I'm not sure what I am anymore... Sometimes I think I'm nothing but what other people have done to me―a big collection of brainwashing, surgeries, and cures... That, and all the mistakes I've made. All the people I've disappointed.

I was so ashamed of who I was.

I hate the past - especially my own past.

You know the passage where Scarlett voices her happiness that her mother is dead, so that she can't see what a bad girl Scarlett has become? Well, that's me.

We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow.

I feel uncomfortable because I'm insecure about who I am.

I was tormented with guilt for years and years. In fact, it was so bad that if I didn't feel wrong, I didn't feel right!

Whenever we feel shame, it's a mark of some deep investment or deep internal struggle.

I act the way I act and I'm not proud of it.

It feels weird to say there's more to me than that, like I'm being overdramatic, and a tear rolls down my cheek. But, no - I do like I feel like there's more to me than just baseball.

There are many things about my life that I wish had been different and that I still find difficult to live down.

I have done bad things. I can't take them back, and they are part of who I am. Most of the time, they seem like the only thing I am.

Sadness usually results from one of the following causes either when a man does not succeed, or is ashamed of his success.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

I have never fit into this town, this marriage, this skin. I am the child who was picked last to play tag; I am the girl who laughed although she did not get the joke; I am the piecemeal part of you that you pretend doesn't exist, except it is all I am, all the time.

All my life I've been dogged by guilt because I feel there is this difference between the way I look and the way I feel inside.

There are moments in life that you wish with all your heart you could take back. Like, just erase from existence. Like, if you could, you'd erase yourself right out of existence too, just to make that moment not exist.

Do you absolutely despise me, Walter?" "No." He hesitated and his voice was strange. "I despise myself.

If I cried me a river of all my confessions, would I drown in my shallow regret?

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".

Of all afflictions, the worst is self-contempt.

I wish I had a twin, so I could know what I'd look like without plastic surgery.

I feel bad that I don't feel worse.