Top 59 Justina Chen Quotes
#1. 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?
Justina Chen
#2. 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
#3. I wondered about her chicken-and-egg relationship with Dad. Which came first? Her helplessness or his controlling?
Justina Chen
#4. 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
#5. Forgiving others is easier when I remember that I'm human and stupid, too.
Justina Chen
#6. Hey, if it's a good philosophy, it works. Death is imminent. Live every day like it's your last.
Justina Chen
#7. If Jacob was right and clothes were costumes and makeup a mask, then our attitudes and habits must be our shields.
Justina Chen
#8. Call yourself a tea drinker all you want, but I know your sneaking in a cup of Kona....
Justina Chen
#9. If there was one thing I refused to be, it was an insignificant footnote in some boy's history.
Justina Chen
#10. 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
#12. You know, there are easier ways to meet a guy than to run him over.
Justina Chen
#13. What was so miraculous about a relationship that was based more on my gratitude than on mutual self respect?
Justina Chen
#14. Jolie laide = "pretty ugly"
Draws you to it ... bored into heart and mind.
Justina Chen
#15. 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.
Justina Chen
#16. 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
#17. How many times had I begged Mom to divorce him already?
Justina Chen
#18. You know there are better ways to meet a guy then running him over.
Justina Chen
#19. 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
#20. You would be surprised what two hours of daily exercise and five hundred stomach crunches can do for you.
Justina Chen
#21. 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
#23. 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?
Justina Chen
#24. You know, sometimes the most direct route isn't the right one. - Jacob
Justina Chen
#25. You can see beauty in everything, except for yourself.
Justina Chen
#26. North-ish." A pause, and then: "Is that Terra for I'm lost-ish?
Justina Chen
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. That's exactly why nature always trumps gardens. Gardens are just reality pruned of chaos. What doesn't work you rip out.
Justina Chen
#30. 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
#31. He knew me in all the ways that truly mattered: the shape of my fears, the contours of my dreams.
Justina Chen
#32. Safe, I decided, didn't leave much room for fun.
Justina Chen
#33. 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
#34. Maybe we don't have the same definition of about what's beautiful. So define it. Define true beauty.
Justina Chen
#36. 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?
Justina Chen
#37. I didn't know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.
Justina Chen
#38. Come on, don't you ever stop and smell the coffee?
Justina Chen
#39. You don't need a geochache for this one."
"You don't, huh?"
"Nope.. here I am. Here I am.
Justina Chen
#40. 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.
Justina Chen
#41. Ever the collector of treasure maps that promised the world but led nowhere.
Justina Chen
#42. 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
#43. These two people who had everything money could buy but the one thing that could be given freely: love.
Justina Chen
#44. That even within its ugliness, there lay a surprising beauty, breathtaking because it was so unexpected.
Justina Chen
#45. 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
#46. No power was total, no power permanent, no power absolute.
Justina Chen
#47. Mom was crying while she cooked, salting domesticity with anguish, the recipe of her life.
Justina Chen
#48. But even quashed rebellions leave us different. Because freedom may be a forbidden fruit in tyrannies, but once tasted, it is unforgettable.
Justina Chen
#49. Adventure in life is good; consistency in coffee even better.
Justina Chen
#50. 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
#51. 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.
Justina Chen
#55. 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.
Justina Chen
#56. 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
#57. Flawed, we're truly interesting, truly memorable, and yes, truly beautiful.
Justina Chen
#58. 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
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