Justina Chen quotes:

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

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.

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

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

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

Forgiving others is easier when I remember that I'm human and stupid, too.

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.

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

You know, sometimes the most direct route isn't the right one. - Jacob

You would be surprised what two hours of daily exercise and five hundred stomach crunches can do for you.

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.

Hey, if it's a good philosophy, it works. Death is imminent. Live every day like it's your last.

I preferred my brand of beauty where Norah was more beautiful than any bimbette, and Mom was beautiful whether sized extra-small or extra-large. Where Peony could look at herself in the mirror and murmur, wow, look at me. Just look at me.

Jacob: "Let her stare."Terra: "What?"Jacob: "Yeah most of the starers are just curious. Smile back. That's what I used to do.

But even quashed rebellions leave us different. Because freedom may be a forbidden fruit in tyrannies, but once tasted, it is unforgettable.

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

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~?

From her dubious tone alone, I could see how Karin had no idea how terrifying words spoken quietly could be. How words chosen precisely to wreak maximum damage ticked like a bomb in your head, but exploded in your heart hours later, leaving you scarred and changed.

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

Wait!" What?" I lowered my cup hastily, wondering if maybe there was a stray hair, or worse, a newly boiled bug inside my cup. You got to smell it first. It's the proper way to cup coffee." Cup coffee?" Taste it." What? Are you the coffee police or something?

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?

My confidence was of the hothouse variety, carefully cultivated under highly regulated conditions. One wrong look, one mean comment, and my facade would wither.

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.

[True beauty] seeps into you. It doesn't make you forget yourself, but totally the opposite. It connects you with everything and fills you with awe that you share the same space with something that glorious. Like a sunrise or a clear blue day or the most extraordinary piece of glass. And then suddenly...you have this epiphany that there's more to the world than just you and what you want or even who you are.

You raze the old to raise the new.

There must be a few times in life when you stand at a precipice of a decision. When you know there will forever be a Before and an After...I knew there would be no turning back if I designated this moment as my own Prime Meridian from which everything else would be measured.

You can see beauty in everything, except for yourself.

To dream is to starve doubt, feed hope.

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.

I didn't know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.

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.

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?

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

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 a time to study a map passionately, obsessively. To see where you've gone, where others have gone before you. To commit to memory every obstacle, every danger. Shakespeare had a term for this obsession: mappery. But there is a time, too, when you say, come dragons. I challenge you to find me.

No power was total, no power permanent, no power absolute.

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

Maybe we don't have the same definition of about what's beautiful. So define it. Define true beauty.

Silence, too, can be torture.

Inertia is so easy"?don't fix what's not broken. Leave well enough alone. So we end up accepting what is broken, mistaking complaining for action, procrastinating for deliberation.

If there was one thing I refused to be, it was an insignificant footnote in some boy's history.

What was so miraculous about a relationship that was based more on my gratitude than on mutual self respect?

I just told Max flatly, "I had laser surgery last week to lighten my birthmark," as if it was no big deal. Oh yeah?" he said. Unexpectedly, Max swiveled around, yanked his pants down. The last thing I thought I had wanted to see tonight was Merc walking out the door. I was wrong. It was this stranger's rear end. "Please don't tell me this is one of those stripping telegrams?

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

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

Like world describers before me, those mapmakers in the seventeenth centure, I had laid down my first faintly drawn border. With that one tentative mark, my world expanded by a few freeing degrees.

You don't need a geochache for this one." "You don't, huh?" "Nope.. here I am. Here I am.

The look he gave me...My stomach quivered in that exact same way when I watched Before Sunset, yearning for a guy to know me so deeply and truly, we were only really complete when we were together. That I could talk, go on wild tangents, make obtuse references, and he would divine my meaning before I knew what I was trying to say myself. Erik had fallen asleep next to me on the couch, complaining later that the movie was "just people talking." He had no idea that this movie could have been a love letter written for me.

If art made you think, then this was Art. Staring at the ball, made of layers and layers of cloth, I wondered about the glass marble at its heart. What if you wanted to reach that marble? Make sure it was still whole? You'd have to remove the layers. You'd have to risk breaking the ball for a chance at freeing it. Fear, knowledge, certainty - you'd have to be willing to let them all go.

A pathfinder's job is hard enough "? blazing trails where there are none, guided by nothing but hearsay and gut. While you're hacking your way through bracken, worrying about lurking beasts, all you can do is hope you had chosen the right direction.

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

There is real comfort in being quiet.

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