"Having grown up here, I always wonder what it would be like to see this city as a tourist. Is it ever a disappointment? I have to believe that New York always lives up to its reputation. The buildings really are that tall. The lights really are that bright. There's truly a story on every corner. But it still might be a shock. To realize you are just one story walking among millions. To not feel the bright lights even as they fill the air. To see the tall buildings and only feel a deep longing for the stars."

"Music is everywhere. It's in the air between us, waiting to be sung."

"There are boys lying awake, hating themselves. There are boys screwing for the right reasons and boys screwing for the wrong ones. There are boys sleeping on benches and under bridges, and luckier unlucky boys sleeping in shelters, which feel like safety but not like home. There are boys so enraptured by love that they can't get their hearts to slow down enough to get some rest, and other boys so damaged by love that they can't stop picking at their pain. There are boys who clutch secrets at night in the same way they clutch denial in the day. There are boys who do not think of themselves at all when they dream. There are boys who will be woken in the night. There are boys who fall asleep with phones to their ears."

"My pride shut me up, my hurt shut me down, and together they ganged up on my hope and let her get away."

"I am proud that I defy your categories. I am proud that I don't fit easily into any box. I am proud of all the things I am and all the things i can be. Question yourself every time you think you only see one thing in me."

"Also, I'm not going to bedevastated or anything either way. I'm not that kind of person. I just think if you don't say thehonest thing, sometimes the honest thing never becomes true, you know, and I- she says,but then I hold up my finger, because I need to hear the thing she just said, and she talks toofast for me to keep up. I keep holding up my hand, thinking if you don't say the honest thing, itnever becomes true."

"The question is there in each silence. The question is there in the space between you. But you cannot bring it aloud."

"It's not his bodythat changesright away.it's somethinginside. he sayshe wants tobe a littleweaker. i don'tunderstand.i say 'thinner?'and he says'no, i wantto be strongerin a differentway.' notbecause of me,but for me."

"I don't have the heart to tell him that's the wrong way to think about the world. There will always be more questions Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go."

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

"I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else."

"Tiny: did someone die?me: yeah, i did.he smiles again at that.tiny: well, then... welcome to the afterlife."

"The way you argued with me, you would have thought that we were debating the existence of God or whether or not we should move in together. These kinds of fights can never be won " even if you're the victor, you've hurt the other person, and there has to be some loss associated with that."

"And when hecatches meoff guardand says'i love you'i catch himoff guardand say 'i need your help."

"The body is the easiest thing to adjust to... It's the life, the context of the body, that can be hard to grasp."

"Tony knows the names of trees and birds. As we walk around, he points them out to me. I try to record them in my mind, but the information never holds. What matters to me is the emotional meaning of the objects."

"Tiny: but there is the word, this word phil wrayson taught me once: weltschmerz. it's the depression you feel when the world as it is does not line up with the world as you think it should be. i live in a big goddamned weltzschermz ocean, you know? and so do you."

"What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease [AIDS] 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."

"You know there's no such thing as a complete lie. There's always some truth in there."

"I once told him that the best way to break up a fight is to step between the two people and start singing ancient folk songs. But I'd never heard of anyone actually doing such a thing."

"I just needed to realize that style was like personality - it didn't always have to be consistent, it just had to be something you lived with."

"I was seventeen, halfway toward eighteen, and I had learned something nobody had ever taught me: Once you get to a certain age, especially if a driver's license is involved, you can go a whole day-a whole week, even-without ever seeing your family. You can maybe say good morning and maybe say good night, but everything in the middle can be left blank."

"I find myself thinking back to something I saw on the local news about a year ago. A teen football player had died in a car accident. The cameras showed all his friends after the funeral-these big hulking guys, all in tears, saying, "I loved him. We all loved him so much. I started crying, too, and I wondered if these guys had told the football player they loved him while he was alive, or whether it was only with death that this strange word, love, could be used. I vowed then and there that I would never hesitate to speak up to the people I loved. They deserved to know they gave meaning to my life. They deserved to know I thought the world of them."

"What a wonderful word, future. Of all the abstractions we can articulate to ourselves, of all the concepts we have that other animals do not, how extraordinary the ability to consider a time that's never been experienced. And how tragic not to consider it. It galls us, we with such a limited future, to see someone brush it aside as meaningless, when it has an endless capacity for meaning, and an endless number of meanings that can be found within it."

"We come to a corner where there are a few people protesting the festivities. I don't understand this at all. It's like protesting the fact that some people are red-haired. In my experience, desire is desire, love is love."

"So what do you have to confess now?"I don't know why I'm saying any of this, except that is the truth. "I'm confessing that I don't know if I'm ready for this.""What is 'this'?""Being open. Being hurt. Liking. Not being liked. Seeing the flicker on. Seeing the flicker off. Leaping. Falling. Crashing."

"It was a laugh that came from the tip of his toes, gaining force and soul as it traveled through his body and out into the world in mirthful bursts. There wasn't anything fake about it; it was an amusement park of a laugh, and when it appeared, you wanted to jump on board."

"Singing in the rain. I'm singing in the rain. And it's such a fucking glorious feeling."

"It's okay, I tell her."It is okay to be happy."

"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?"

"I've always known I was gay, but it wasn't confirmed until I was in kindergarten.It was my teacher who said so. It was right there on my kindergarten report card: PAUL IS DEFINITELY GAY AND HAS VERY GOOD SENSE OF SELF."

"It's colder than a witch's tit in a steel bra."

"Loss takes as much as love does, sometimes more."

"Elijah is inexplicably moved by the broken columns and fragmented floors. He cannot help but find a meaning and a message in their poverty of stature. This is what remains, he thinks. It seems a valuable lesson on a day when card catalogs are dying, communications are deleted, and buildings crumble under the weight of society's expectations."

"I am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me."

"When you dance, you measure distance as if it's a solid thing; you make precise judgments every time two bodies exist in relation to each other. So I knew right away the definition of the space between us."

"I hate the phrase 'more than friends'," Joni told me one night not long ago. "It's such nonsense. When I'm going out with someone, we're not 'more than friends' - most of the time, we're not even friends. 'More than friends' makes no sense. Look at us. There's nothing more than us."

"Now I just want it to end. I've always wanted the happy ending, but now I'll just settle for the ending."

"No. I don't. You don't always have to be who they want you to be, you know."

"I told her about the time that I got so tired of you stealing the sheets that in my sleep-weary logic I decided that the thing to do was to tie them around my legs, knot and all, and how, when you attempted to steal them that night, you ended up yanking me into you, and I was so startled that I sprang up, tripped, and was nearly concussed."

"It is a sound like loneliness-enough to let you know you're there, but not enough to fill you with life."

"We are not taught "love thy neighbor unless their skin is a different color from yours " or "love thy neighbor unless they don't make money as you do" or "love thy neighbor unless they don't share your belies." We are taught "love thy neighbor". No exceptions. We are all in this together - every single one of us. And the only way we are going to survive as a society is through compassion. A Great Community does not mean we all think the same things or do the same things. It simply means we are willing to work together and are willing to love despite our differences."

"I can tell from the glint in her eyes that she's at least an acquaintance of Dorothy."

"We watch them grow, with sadness and amazement and fear. We have stepped away, but not entirely away. They know this. They sense it. We are no longer here, but we are not yet gone. And we will be like that for the rest of their lives.We watch, and they surprise us.We watch, and they surpass us."

"The quiet times are the ones to hold on to."

"So what's your story? Ryan asks.Avery looks up at him, hand still in the water. "My story?"Yeah. Everybody has at least one."

"They have left the first stage of romance-the rhapsody of us. Where everything is you-me or me-you or a giddily tentative we. Now him and her are asserting themselves, each given a private, pensive depth. Within the rhapsody of us, Elijah could think, I don't really know you, but I will. Now he is not so sure."

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

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

"Maybe fate's arithmetic is so diffuse that it's not arithmetic at all."