David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing

"The world is full of people who think different is synonymous with wrong."

"All the quips in the world couldn’t prevent Oscar Wilde from becoming a lovesick fool."

"The feeling that the world is full of people who think different is synonymous with wrong."

"As we become the distant past, you become a future few of us would have imagined."

"Avery doesn’t know what these people are talking about, and since he’s driving, he can’t go online to check. The sensation he has is a strange, difficult one. He knows these people aren’t talking about him. But at the same time they are talking about him, in their blanket dismissal. And they’re also talking about us. Because so many of them are our age or older, stuck in previous decades of thought. The gays of today, the gays of yesterday—we’re all the same bother, all the same wrong. Not people, really. Just something to yell about."

"It’s a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn’t really care what you have to say."

"This is what you do now to give your day topography--scan the boxes, read the news, see the chain of your friends reporting about themselves, take the 140-character expository bursts and sift through for the information you need. It's a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn't really care what you have to say. The illusion of participation can sometimes lead to participation. But more often than not, it only leads to more illusion, dressed in the guise of reality."

"The pink-haired boy is scared, so incredibly scared - only the thing you've most wished for can scare you in that way."

"Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were."

"People like to say being gay isn't like skin color, isn't anything physical. They tell us we always have the option of hiding. But if that's true, why do they always find us?"

"Stupid arbitrary shit means it will take a movie star to die and a hemophiliac teenager to die before ordinary people start to mobilize, start to feel that the disease needs to be stopped. Tens of thousands of people will die before drugs are made and drugs are approved. What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of lives would have been saved"

"If you put enough closets together, you have enough space for a room. If you put enough rooms together, you have enough space for a house. If you put enough houses together, you have space for a town, then a city, then a nation, then a world."

"If you put enough closets together, you have enough space for a room. If you put enough rooms together, you have enough room for a house. If you put enough houses together, you have space for a town, then a city, then a nation, then a world."

"Pink is female - but why? Are girls any more pink than boys? Are boys any more blue than girls? It's something that has been sold to us, mostly so other things can be sold to us."

"Look, look, we tell each other. It's Tom!He's Mr. Bellamy to his history students. But he's Tom to us. Tom! It's so good to see him. So wonderful to see him. Tom is one of us. Tom went through it all with us. Tom made it through. He was there in the hospital with so many of us, the archangel of St. Vincent's, our healthier version, prodding the doctors and calling over the nurses and holding our hands and holding the hands of our partners, our parents, our little sisters - anyone who had a hand to be held. He had to watch so many of us die, had to say goodbye so many times. Outside of our rooms he would get angry, upset, despairing. But when he was with us, it was like he was powered solely by an engine of grace. Even the people who loved us would hesitate at first to touch us - more from the shock of our diminishment, from the strangeness of how we were both gone and present, not who we were but still who we were. Tom became used to this. First because of Dennis, the way he stayed with Dennis until the very end. He could have left after that, after Dennis was gone. We wouldn't have blamed him. But he stayed. When his friends got sick, he was there. And for those of us he'd never know before - he was always a smile in the room, always a touch on the shoulder, a light flirtation that we needed. The y should have made him a nurse. They should have made him mayor. He lost years of his life to us, although that's not the story he'd tell. He would say he gained. And he'd say he was lucky, because when he came down with it, when his blood turned against him, it was a little later on and the cocktail was starting to work. So he lived. He made it to a different kind of after from the rest of us. It is still an after. Every day if feel to him like an after. But he is here. He is living. A history teacher. An out, outspoken history teacher. The kind of history teacher we never would have had. But this is what losing most of your friends does: It makes you unafraid. Whatever anyone threatens, whatever anyone is offended by, it doesn't matter, because you have already survived much, much worse. In fact, you are still surviving. You survive every single, blessed day. It makes sense for Tom to be here. It wouldn't be the same without him. And it makes sense for him to have taken the hardest shift. The night watch. Mr. Nichol passes him the stopwatch. Tom walks over and says hello to Harry and Craig. He's been watching the feed, but it's even more powerful to see these boys in person. He gestures to them, like a rabbi or a priest offering a benediction."Keep going," he says. "You're doing great."Mrs. Archer, Harry's next-door neighbor, has brought over coffee, and offers Tom a cup. He takes it gratefully. He wants to be wide awake for all of this. Every now and then he looks to the sky."

"Just when we stopped wanting to kill ourselves, we started to die."

"Doubt is an acceptable risk for happiness."

"Some of our parents were always on our side. Some of our parents chose to banish us rather than see us for who we were. And some of our parents, when they found out we were sick, stopped being dragons and became dragonslayers instead. Sometimes that’s what it takes—the final battle. But it should take much, much less than that."

"They should be going to sleep, but good company is the enemy of sleep."

"This is the power of a kiss: It does not have the power to kill you. But it has the power to bring you to life."