Justina Chen citations

“Teachers wondered why I didn't speak up more in class. Why would I when I knew how precarious words could be, how betraying they were, how vulnerable they made you?”

“Getting lost is just another way of saying 'going exploring.”

“Beauty—real everlasting beauty—lives not on our faces, but in our attitude and our actions. It lives in what we do for ourselves and for others.”

“He knew me in all the ways that truly mattered: the shape of my fears, the contours of my dreams.”

“To dream is to starve doubt, feed hope.”

“Flawed, we're truly interesting, truly memorable, and yes, truly beautiful.”

“Adventure in life is good; consistency in coffee even better.”

“I hated roses. I hated them for being so trite, so clichéd, a default, all-purpose flower that said I love you, I'm sorry, and get well soon. Give me peonies and tulips, orchids or gardenia. Those were flowers with character.”

“Come on, don't you ever stop and smell the coffee?”

“You raze the old to raise the new.”

“When the creative impulse sweeps over you, grab it. You grab it and honor it and use it, because momentum is a rare gift.”

“Inertia iseasy—don't fix what's not broken. Leave well enough alone. So we end up accepting whatbroken, mistaking complaining for action, procrastinating for deliberation.”

“Maybe getting around in life was nothing but map-reading. A skill that required practice. A key to unlock where you wanted to go. A legend to show where you were.”

“That's when it struck me: how gorgeous we all were, even with cellulite (saw a lot of that) and stretch marks, scars and tattoos. Let me just say this, not single body was perfect, not even the fittest of women there.”

“Physical beauty wasn't the same as True Beauty, any more than pretty ugly meant truly ugly or Magnetic North meant True North.”

“That's exactly why nature always trumps gardens. Gardens are just reality pruned of chaos. What doesn't work you rip out.”

“If Jacob was right and clothes were costumes and makeup a mask, then our attitudes and habits must be our shields.”

“What would it be like to look in the mirror and actually accept what you see? Not loathe the reflection, or despise it, or be resigned to it? But to like it?”

“You know, there are easier ways to meet a guy than to run him over.”

“Silence, too, can be torture.”

“Let the glossy spreads have their heart-stopping, head-turning kind of beauty. Give me the heart-filling beauty instead. Jolie laide, that's what I would choose. Flawed, we're truly interesting, truly memorable, and yes, truly beautiful.”

“There is real comfort in being quiet.”

“Safe, I decided, didn't leave much room for fun.”

“I wondered about her chicken-and-egg relationship with Dad. Which came first? Her helplessness or his controlling?”

“What swells inside me is a love so boundless, I am the sunrise and sunset. I am Liberty Bell in the Cascades. I am Beihai Lake. I am every beautiful, truly beautiful, thing I've ever seen, captured in my personal Geographia, the atlas of myself.”

“The pressure of his touch through my jacket and my sweater was more assurance than any promise ever made to me. It was a touch that said, I have your back and I am here for you. If a girl wasn't careful, she could fall in love with a touch like that.”

“Jolie laide = "pretty ugly"
Draws you to it… bored into heart and mind.”