This month I read “Everyday” by David Levithan for the monthly book club I lead. In the book discussion, everyone agreed it was a beautifully written book. In my case, I concluded that ‘A’ was my type of person; a person who sees the world the way that I do and someone I would love and cherish if such a person existed out of the author’s mind.
As I read the book, I underlined, marked, and filled the book with post-its, pinpointing the excerpts I felt needed to be shared; words that made me re-assure my position on certain topics and relive memories of my own adolescence. So what better then to share them in a blog.
Here are my favorite excerpts:
“Knowledge is the only thing I take with me when I go.” (p.7)
“And as we drift into sleep, I feel something I’ve never felt before. A closeness that isn’t merely physical. A connection that defies the fact that we’ve only just met. A sensation that can only come from the most euphoric of feelings: belonging.” (p.22)
“The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations- all of them rearranging themselves so that this precise, remarkable intersection could happen. In your heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secret arrows were pointing here, the universe and time itself crafted this long ago, and you are just realizing it, you are just arriving at the place you were always meant to be.” (p. 23)
“It’s one thing to fall in love. It’s another to feel someone else falling in love with you, and to feel a responsibility toward that love.” (p. 25)
“Once you’ve experience enormity, it lingers everywhere you look, and wants to be every word you say.” (p. 32)
“Yesterday is another world. I want to go back there.” (p. 34)
“Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen.” (p. 56)
“It’s only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentuous, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. Yes, the difference between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren’t a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion – whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or somthing else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that’s different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.” (p. 77)
“It would be easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead I feel painfully visible and entirely ignored.” (p. 122)
“If your beauty is unquestioned, so many other things can go unquestioned as well.” (p. 150)
“This is the problem with being so beautiful – it can render you untouchable.” (p. 151)
“We’re sharing the same space, but our thoughts are spreading outside of it.” (p.151)
“Every relationship has a hard part at the beginning. This is our hard part. It’s not like a puzzle piece where there’s an instant fit. With relationships, you have to shape the pieces on each end before they go perfectly together.” (p. 260)