Justina Chen Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

And then there was Jacob, who stepped closer to me and then waited, letting me decide whether I would take the next step. Balanced there in indecision, it was as if the Twisted Sisters were before me, shaking their pom-poms, asking: But what is fair about staying with a guy who is ashamed to be seen with you? What was so miraculous about a relationship that was based more on my gratitude than mutual respect.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

These two people who had everything money could buy but the one thing that could be given freely: love.

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

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

You can see beauty in everything, except for yourself.

You raze the old to raise the new.

You know there are better ways to meet a guy then running him over.

I understood now: how nothing looked more beautiful than that scar of his, that borderline that separated what Jacob could have been had he stayed in that orphanage from who he is.

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

North-ish." A pause, and then: "Is that Terra for I'm lost-ish?

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?

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

Without looking at Jacob, I said slowly, 'Well, it seeps into you. It doesn't make you forget yourself, but totally the opposite.' I chance a glance at him. He was watching me intently. No glaze in his eyes. So I continued more bravely: 'It connect you with everything and fills you with awe that you share the same space with something that glorious. Like a sunrise on a clear blue day of the most extraordinary piece of glass. And then suddenly'
my hands escaped their tight grip in my lap, and now my fingers splayed wide like fireworks in the air
'you have this epiphany that there's more to the world than just you and what you want or even who you are.

Even geniuses can be A class assholes.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

So, really," continued Jacob as if this were perfectly normal to expound on art in these circumstances, "when you think about it, the artists who make people stop and think, who push the form, who make you uncomfortable, who are laughable, well, they're the ones who get remembered." Idly, Jacob dug a hole in the snow with his shovel and then another one next to it. "So why wouldn't you want to join the ranks of the ridiculed?

We can choice to cower at the river's edge, watching as life sails past us, always the bystander, never the participant. We can shade our eyes and fret about all the untold dangers below the surface. We can play and replay all the warnings we've ever heard.
Or.
Or we can equip ourselves with what we need to survive

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?

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Its as if God cruised through one of those Chinese fast-food buffets and bought Abe the full meal dealso he can pass for Mama's beloved son. When it came to my turn, all that was left was one of those soggy egg rollsthat doesn't qualify as real Chinese food.

Call yourself a tea drinker all you want, but I know your sneaking in a cup of Kona....

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

That even within its ugliness, there lay a surprising beauty, breathtaking because it was so unexpected.

Progress is hard on history.

This is beautiful," I said, ignoring the shop window to trace the gleaming stone walls fronting another boutique.
"You know what's funny?" Jacob asked. He didn't wait for my answer. "You can see beauty in everything, except for yourself."
***
I swallowed hard. Erik thought my body was beautiful, Karin that it was enviable. At random times, people had noted that my hands were beautiful, or my hair. The Twisted Sisters had called my art beautiful. Mom had the best intentions and always told me before and after my laser surgeries that I would be beautiful. But no one had ever said that I was beautiful, all my parts taken together, not just the bits and pieces.

When you think about it, life is a risk. Every day is a risk. Getting in a car is a risk. Loving is a risk. But, darling, losing it all means that you have a chance to rebuild, better than before.

But the truly brilliant geocachers?"
"Yeah?" he says. "What about us?"
"They know it by its real name. Terra Firma."
"Terra Firma," he repeats. At last, he slips his backpack off his shoulder. I know what he's looking for.
I take a breath. "You don't need your GPS for this cache."
His eyes don't move off mine; he's watching me so carefully. "You don't, huh?"
"Nope," I say.
Some things are meant to be kept - what you learn from experiences good or bad, smiles from an orphaned girl, a boy who is your compass pointing to your True North. So I look at Jacob full in the face with nothing obscuring him. Or me. And then I step closer to him. And closer. And closer yet.
"Here I am," I tell him. "Here I am.

Maybe that was the problem," Jacob said softly. "Don't we all need to feel needed? That we'd be missed if we were gone?

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

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.

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.

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?