David Levithan Quotes

I agree with myself on 80 percent of things, but when I look at myself in the mirror in the morning, I still have inner debates about the right thing to do.

...a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.

What really fueled me, and maybe infuriated me, is that nobody believed in me. Nobody. I don't even think I believe in myself.

But it's no use now," thought poor Alice, "to pretend to be two people! Why, there's ahrdly enough of me left to make one respectable person!

and I try to draw the line but it ends up running down the middle of me most of the time.

There are some things about myself I can’t explain to anyone. There are some things I don’t understand at all. I can’t tell what I think about things or what I’m after. I don’t know what my strengths are or what I’m supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I’m not such a wonderful human being.

Not to get too depressing, I've always been a slight whirling dervish in my life. I've always been at once a very spritely and energetic hilarious lady, but at the same time there is an equal dark side that's as comparable to the jovial - constantly walking on the high wire trying to figure out who to be each day.

I think that I'm throwing but I'm thrown

I can't think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated.

She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?

The social mould civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies.

Digory never spoke on the way back, and the others were shy of speaking to him. He was very sad and he wasn't even sure all the time that he had done the right thing; but whenever he remembered the shining tears in Aslan's eyes he became sure.

Maybe he was real. Maybe I'd made him up. Either way, he didn't think I needed him anymore. Maybe he was right.

In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

I'm thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.

But in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me and dampens and injures some things in me that I value.

Sometimes I think I spend my whole life trying to figure out where I fit in.

I think it's bad for human beings to be artists. It's awful. You want to do something but you're constantly trying to decide what you want to do. Let's just say it's no place like Hawaii.

I'm fine. Well, I'm not fine - I'm here." "Is there something wrong with that?" "Absolutely.

I think maybe the reason I have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to prepare myself to train my body for real fear when it comes. But I am not prepared.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

I don't know who I am. But I do know who I'm not. I have occasionally tried playing people I'm definitely not, and that wasn't a very pleasant experience.

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.

Why am I always at war with myself? Why have I told, as if upon compulsion, what I knew all along I ought to have withheld? Why am I making a friend of this woman beside me, in spite of the whispers against her that I hear in my heart?