Justina Chen Quotes

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.

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

“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.”

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

“You raze the old to raise the new.”

— Justina Chen

“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.”

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

“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.”

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

“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.”

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

“Silence, too, can be torture.”

— Justina Chen

“There is real comfort in being quiet.”

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

“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.”

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

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.

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

“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.”

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

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?

— Justina Chen

“Ever the collector of treasure maps that promised the world but led nowhere.”

— Justina Chen

“I took her hand in mine, not the way I used to hold hers as a child, but with our fingers woven together. And we strode through the archway of emperors and into the open
hand in hand, my mother and I.”

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

“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.”

— Justina Chen

“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.”

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

“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?”

— Justina Chen

“By the time I slip back to my room, it's almost six. Jasmine is in bed, awake and waiting for me ... "Where were you?"
Where was I? Chased by a fat guard, hit by a laugh attack and nearly thrown out of Stanford University Math Camp, never to see the light of the campus ever again, and certainly not as a future student.”

— Justina Chen

“No experience is wasted.”

— Justina Chen

“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”

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

“Hao Kan," I said gently, quietly, firmly as if it was a pact between the two of us.
She blinked. I wasn't sure if she understood. Or if she believed she was beautiful. So I pointed at her and then to me. And I repeated with utter conviction, "Hao Kan."
Those words, my pronouncement, won me the girl's slow nod. I nodded back. And when she smiled, wide and open, I tell you, there was nothing more beautiful that that.”

— Justina Chen

How many times had I begged Mom to divorce him already?

— Justina Chen

“Even geniuses can be A class assholes.”

— Justina Chen

“Mom was crying while she cooked, salting domesticity with anguish, the recipe of her life.”

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

“You can see beauty in everything, except for yourself.”

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen