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"Exemplar, n.It's always something we have to negotiate- the face that my parents are happy, and yours have never been. I have something to live up to, and if I fail, I still have a family to welcome me home. You have a storyline to rewrite, and a lack of faith that it can ever be done.You love my parents, I know. But you never get too close. You never truly believe there aren't bad secrets underneath."
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"If love has taken us for a ride and passion made us ignore sham and swindle, the time has come to separate the wheat from the chaff and polish up diamonds of trust, neatly, day by day. ['Taken for a ride']"

"This last week has been a little hell for both of us simply because I didn't understand my own feelings. And because I can't understand them, I blame her for provoking in me feelings that make my world seem suddenly unsafe."

"Unless you can be yourself, you won't stay with anyone for long."

"My growth as a human being has been directly proportional to my growth as a marital artist."

"Jake guessed Henry had been pulling shit like this on him so long that Eddie only noticed it when Henry pulled it on someone else " someone like the blonde ticket-seller."

"She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, and said nothing about it, and prayed for the power to forgive, and did forgive. But he can't have found living with her forgiveness all that easy. Breakfast in a haze of forgiveness: coffee with forgiveness, porridge with forgiveness, forgiveness on the buttered toast. He would have been helpless against it, for how can you repudiate something that is never spoken? She resented, too, the nurse, or the many nurses, who had attended my father in the various hospitals. She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone-to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny."

"Falling in love, although it resulted in altered body chemistry and was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to him. In addition it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both challenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the problem of intergenerational genetic transfer."

"It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;-it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others."

"Once someone learns what a relationship comes to teach, the relationship can move on to make room for new teachers to come in with new lessons and new levels of love."

"For marriage is like life in this-that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses."
Explore more quotes by David Levithan

"There has to be a moment at the beginning where you wonder whether you're in love with the person or in love with the feeling of love itself. If the moment doesn't pass, that's it-you're done. And if the moment does pass, it never goes that far. It stands in the distance, ready for whenever you want it back. Sometimes it's even there when you thought you were searching for something else, like an escape route, or your lovers' face."

"You don't know me. You know one me, just like I know one you. And you can't know every me, and I can't know every you."

"Here's what I think. We all want someone to build a fort with. We want somebody to swap crayons with and play hide-and-seek with and live out imaginary stories with. We start out getting that from our family. Then we get it from our friends. And then, for whatever reasons, we get it in our heads that we need to get that feeling- that intimacy- from a single someone else. We call if growing up. But really, when you take sex out of it, what we want is a companion. And we make that so damn hard to find."

"I tried to shut myself down completely, put up my best screensaver personality to coast through the day. I didn't want to see her. I was desperate to see her. I wanted to hold it together. I wanted to melt down right at her feet and scream, Look what you've done to me."

"LYNDA (TO TINY):Look forward to the momentwhen it falls apart.Look forward to themomentwhen you mustrearrange yourheart.It might feel like theend of the world-but it's the beginning of yourart."

"That's what it felt like - that if I let a little of the hurt out, it would keep pouring out until I was a deflated balloon of a person, with a big monster of hurt in front of me."

"O Lord, as I walk through the valley of the shadow of doubt, at least let mewear a Walkman..."
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