David Levithan Quotes

At midlife, I think a woman has more in common with her teenage children than anybody else. We all are kind of uncertain. We realize for the first time in either our lives or decades that we're in charge now.

You should always know when you're shifting gears in life. You should leave your era; it should never leave you.

All the characters on 'Girls' are growing and changing, which is how real people behave, especially when we're young, trying to figure out who we are, doing things that are the polar opposite of our characteristics.

Who doesn't change through their 20s? I changed probably more than the average person who lives in one place and has a job. But everybody changes significantly in maturity, we'd like to think, from 20 to 30.

I'm still learning more about myself and my situation and really, off the court, how to function there, because I'm kind of getting the taste of retirement now.

The only thing that you can do is do jobs and see if people respond to that. I'm always holding onto the fact that I don't really know who I am. Hopefully I won't compartmentalize myself because of that, because I'm completely ignorant of the whole.

The more I think about myself, the more I'm persuaded that, as a person, I really don't exist. That is one of the reasons why I can't believe in any orthodox religion: I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound, conditioned by environment and education. My "character" is simply a repertoire of acquired tricks, my conversation a repertoire of adaptations and echoes, my "feelings" are dictated by purely physical, external stimuli.

You have to look inside yourself and you have to say, well, what am I about? Why does anyone need this? Why does anyone need a 'Tom Ford' jacket? What do I believe in?

We all believe that we are a certain kind of person, but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise, or until we die.

We spend so much of our early lives trying to figure out who we really are. And we spend the rest of our lives preparing ourselves to let it go.

I believe that a lot of people in our society today, people who have been hurt and even people who haven't been hurt, get their worth and value from what they do, what they look like, what they own, what kind of job they have, what kind of house they live in, how much money they have, what social circles they're in, what level of education they have, especially even how other people respond to them. They feel better about themselves if everybody is giving a smiling nod to the way they look and all their choices.

You get to a certain age, and you feel like you know who you are, and how you fit into the world, and how the world sort of perceives you. And you get pretty set in that. And then things can happen that can turn it upside.

And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.

Middle Age At forty-five, What next, what next? At every corner, I meet my Father, My age, still alive.

When you don't know your values or who you are or you start to believe things other people are telling you, you get lost. I was just lost because I didn't know what I meant to music or what music meant to me. Now I just belong solo and I belong by myself.

It's not a little thing to lose your identification and who you believe yourself to be.

Ask yourself these three questions, Tatiana Metanova, and you will know who you are. Ask: What do believe in? What do you hope for? What do you love?

Nothing is real if you don't believe in who you are!

I think creative blocks come from people's life journeys. If you don't know who you are or what you're about or what you believe in it's really pretty impossible to be creative.

I am much more settled in who I am. I think a lot of your 20s is trying to figure out who you are - you're on your own, you've got you first job, you've got your first apartment, you're living away from your parents, you're just discovering who you are. I have deep, long friendships now and real relationships and I am so excited about the rest of my 40s.

I wanted to seem completely invisible but whenever you're saying someone else's words and relaying the story of someone else's life, it's not you.

I think time just goes faster and faster. I'm saying this a few months away from my fortieth birthday. I don't know when and if one's identity ever does catch up with one's actual age. Personally I feel like I just got the hang of thirty-five.

Maybe I’d like to be defined by what I am.

I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile. Life is confusing enough.

I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.