Ty

“He thinks it's because he was born in the wrong body, but we want to whisper in his ears that many of us were born in the right bodies and still felt foreign inside them, felt betrayed. We completely misunderstood our bodies. We punished them, berated them, held them to an Olympian ideal that was deeply unfair to them. We loathed the hair in some places and the lack of hair in others. We wanted to everything to be tighter, stronger, harder, faster. We rarely recognized our own beauty unless someone else was recognizing it for us. We starved or we pushed or we hid or we paraded, and there was always another body we thought was better than ours. There was always something wrong, most time numerous things wrong. When we were healthy, we were ignorant. We could never be content within our own skin.
Breathe, we want to tell Avery. Feel yourself breathe. Because that is as much a part of your body as anything else.
Avery, we whisper, you are a marvel.
And he is. He may never believe it, but he is.”
― David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
― Elizabeth Warren, A Fighting Chance

“We know that some of you are still scared. We know that some of you are still silent. Just because it's better now doesn't mean that it's always good.”
― David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing

“I'm sorry," he says. "I don't usually like people. So when I do, part of me is really amused and the other part refuses to believe it's happening.”
― David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing