David Levithan, Every Day

"I want you to be honest with me. Even if it hurts. Although I would prefer for it not to hurt. - A"

"Falling in love with someone doesn’t mean you know any better how they feel. It only means you know how you feel."

"I wake up feverish, sore, uncomfortable. Is it sickness or is it heartbreak?I can't tell. The thermometer says I'm normal, but I'm clearly not."

"In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love for a gender. I have fallen for individuals. I know this is hard for people to do, but I don’t understand why it’s so hard, when it’s so obvious."

"It was so much easier when I didn't want anything. Not getting what you want can make you cruel."

"After a while, you have to be at peace with the fact that you simply are. There is no way to know why."

"I am jealous of anyone who can make other people care so much."

"It is an awful thing to be betrayed by your body. And it's lonely, because you feel you can't talk about it. You feel it's something between you and the body. You feel it's a battle you will never win . . . and yet you fight it day after day, and it wears you down. Even if you try to ignore it, the energy it takes to ignore it will exhaust you."

"They are so caught up in their happiness that they don't realize I'm not really a part of it. I am wandering along the periphery. I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood. . . . There are moments I just sit in my frame, float in my tank, ride in my car and say nothing, think nothing that connects me to anything at all."

"It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored."

"I wanted love to conquer all. But love can't conquer anything."

"If I'm not telling you something, it's for a reason. Just because you trust me, it doesn't mean I have to automatically trust you. Trust doesn't work like that."

"Now she’s lit by the warm orange spreading from the horizon as not-quite-day, becomes not-quite-night"

"When you live as I do, you cannot indulge in jealousy. If you do, it will rip you apart."

"Depression has been likened to both a black cloud and a black dog. For someone like Kelsea, the black cloud is the right metaphor. She is surrounded by it, immersed within it, and there is no obvious way out. What she needs to do is try to contain it, get it into the form of the black dog. It will still follow her around wherever she goes; it will always be there. But at least it will be separate, and will follow her lead."

"Any time I let it, the weight of living creeps in and starts to drag her down. It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored. People talk to her, but it feels like they are outside a house, talking through the walls. There are friends, but they are people to spend time with, not people to share time with. There's a false beast that takes the form of instinct and harps on the pointlessness of everything that happens."

"There are friends, but they are people to spend time with, not people to share time with. There's a false beast that takes the form of instinct and harps on the pointlessness of everything that happens."

"Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over. I know how wrong this is. When I was a child, I didn't understand. I would wake up in a new body and wouldn't comprehend why things felt muted, dimmer. Or the opposite--I'd be supercharged, unfocused, like a radio at top volume flipping quickly from station to station. Since I didn't have access to the body's emotions, I assumed the ones I was feeling were my own. Eventually, though, I realized these inclinations, these compulsions, were as much a part of the body as its eye color or its voice. Yes, the feelings themselves were intangible, amorphous, but the cause of the feelings was a matter of chemistry, biology. It is a hard cycle to conquer. The body is working against you. And because of this, you feel even more despair. Which only amplifies the imbalance. It takes uncommon strength to live with these things. But I have seen that strength over and over again."

"I want to say more, but don't know what the words are supposed to be. I feel such a tenderness for these vulnerable night time conversations, the way words take a different shape in the air when there's no room in the air."

"I want to say more, but don't know what the words are supposed to be. I feel such a tenderness for these vulnerable night-time conversations, the way words take a different shape in the air when there's no light in the room."