David Levithan Quotes

I traffic in empathy. I try to be vulnerable with people so they can be vulnerable back. I've always been searching for empathy in other people. It's when I feel most not alone.

Not listening to people who care about you, not to be open or transparent, will make you isolated.

My ideal world was the early days of Twitter, where everyone was curious about each other and everyone saw it as kind of a window into people's lives where we could be compassionate and curious and empathetic and we could tell each other secrets.

It’s amazing how lonely you can feel and like nobody understands…The moment you are vulnerable, someone always reaches out….They go through the same things. I want them to feel comfortable knowing that I have flaws as wells. I want them to know those flaws. I’m afraid of the pedestal…I want to be a peer to my fans

If you don't understand, ask questions. If you're uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It's easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here's to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.

Honesty and vulnerability endear us to people; they don't endanger us in our relationship.

The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are. Everybody needs to be understood. And out of that comes every form of love.

...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.

When we admit our vulnerability, we include others. If we deny it, we shut them out.

You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart.

Vulnerability is not a weakness but a faculty for understanding.

The fifth province is not anywhere here or there, north or south, east or west. It is a place within each of us. It is that place that is open to the other, that swinging door which allows us to venture out and others to venture in.

...we both saw something we liked, a willingness to have no walls, or maybe just an unwillingness to keep them standing.

Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything.

Always before, I just said no, left it solidly there. I waver now. I want to share everything with him. Want to know what he knows, feel what he feels, share the same space he's in.

What I write is emotionally honest and truthful as the human experience can be, to make people feel less alone, or at least that's the hope.

For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

So many of us are reaching out, hoping someone out there will grab our hands and remind us we are not as alone as we fear.

I think the best way people can connect to you is by being real

I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.

I have been missing the point. The point is not knowing another person, or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others into our hearts?

They say there is a doorway from heart to heart, but what is the use of a door when there are no walls?

Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.

How does light enter a house? If the windows are open. How does light enter a human? If the door of love is open.

Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you’re sneaky, all the ways that you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all of that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether. We are all up against these things. We are all in this together.