David Levithan Quotes

How we need another soul to cling to.

Romantic love can be terrifying. We experience another human being as enormously important to us. So there is surrender - not a surrender to the other person so much as to our feeling for the other person. What is the obstacle? The possibility of loss.

Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.

Grief is the price we pay for being close to one another. If we want to avoid our grief, we simply avoid each other.

The thing that makes me most vulnerable is romantic relationship.

No one really wants to admit they are lonely, and it is never really addressed very much between friends and family. But I have felt lonely many times in my life.

I love nicknames. It makes me feel loved. It makes me feel less alone in this world.

The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.

The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.

A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don't function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.

I've never fallen in love right off the bat. I get scared to say I love you too soon because it means so much. It means you're not seeing an end to things.

If you are a card-carrying human being, chances are that you share the same fear as all other humans: the fear of losing love, respect and connection to others. And if you are human, in order to avoid or prevent the pain, trauma and perceived devastation of the loss, you will do anything to avoid your greatest fear from being visited on you.

People are so fearful about opening themselves up. All you want to do is to be able to connect with other people. When you connect with other people, you connect with something in yourself. It makes you feel happy. And yet it's so scary - it makes people feel vulnerable and unsafe.

No one was created to be alone.

I never want to feel too far away from people. I think that's when you get in trouble.

I would like to be soft and warm. I would be terrified to be that way. I could be hurt if I were soft and warm. I could be hurt by something other than myself. It is harder to be soft than it is to be hard. I could be hurt by something other than myself.

People are lonely in this world for lots of different reasons. Some people have something in their disposition. Maybe they were born too mean, or maybe they were born too tender. But most people are brought to where they are by circumstance, by calamity or a broken heart or something else happening in their lives that wasn't anything they planned on. People are lonely in this world for lots of different reasons. The one thing that I do know is, it doesn't matter what any one of them tell you -- nobody wants to be alone.

But you cant shut everyone out. I mean you have to have someone to love. . .someone to hold on to. . . someone--

Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.

Love is so painful, how could you ever wish it on anybody? And love is so essential, how could you ever stand in its way?

If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love - and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.

Maybe I was afraid to trust him with something so personal as my devotion.

its no surprise to me that anyone hardly tells the truth about how they feel. The smart ones keep to themselves for good reason. Why would you want to tell anyone anything that's dear to you? Even when you like them and want nothing more than to be closer to them? It's so painful to be next to someone you feel so strongly about and know you can't say the things you want to.

But the more people we love and the more deeply we love them, the more vulnerable we are to loss and grief and loneliness.

The only one who's got enough of me to break my heart.