“Getting lost is just another way of saying 'going exploring.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of 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.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“To dream is to starve doubt, feed hope.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“Adventure in life is good; consistency in coffee even better.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“Flawed, we're truly interesting, truly memorable, and yes, truly beautiful.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“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.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“Come on, don't you ever stop and smell the coffee?”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“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, quote from North of Beautiful
“You raze the old to raise the new.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“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.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“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, quote from North of Beautiful
“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.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“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, quote from North of Beautiful
“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, quote from North of Beautiful
“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, quote from North of Beautiful
“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, quote from North of Beautiful
“That's exactly why nature always trumps gardens. Gardens are just reality pruned of chaos. What doesn't work you rip out.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“[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.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“If Jacob was right and clothes were costumes and makeup a mask, then our attitudes and habits must be our shields.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“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, quote from North of Beautiful
“You know, there are easier ways to meet a guy than to run him over.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“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, quote from North of Beautiful
“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.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“There is real comfort in being quiet.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“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.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“Safe, I decided, didn't leave much room for fun.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“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, quote from North of Beautiful
“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.”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
“I wondered about her chicken-and-egg relationship with Dad. Which came first? Her helplessness or his controlling?”
― Justina Chen, quote from North of Beautiful
Justina Chen
Born place: The United States
See more on GoodReads
“I was always fishing for something on the radio. Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my life. I moved the dial up and down and Roy Orbison's voice came blasting out of the small speakers. His new song, "Running Scared," exploded into the room.
Orbison, though, transcended all the genres - folk, country, rock and roll or just about anything. His stuff mixed all the styles and some that hadn't even been invented yet. He could sound mean and nasty on one line and then sing in a falsetto voice like Frankie Valli in the next. With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business. One of his previous songs, "Ooby Dooby" was deceptively simple, but Roy had progressed. He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he'd start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttring to yourself something like, "Man, I don't believe it." His songs had songs within songs. They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. Orbison was deadly serious - no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn't anything else on the radio like him.”
― Bob Dylan, quote from Chronicles, Volume One
“The law is not a "light" for you or any man to see by; the law is not an instrument of any kind. ...The law is a causeway upon which, so long as he keeps to it, a citizen may walk safely.”
― Robert Bolt, quote from A Man for All Seasons
“As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive. Family and friends know, after long years of wearying experience, that the fixture list always has the last word in any arrangement; they understand, or at least accept, that christenings or weddings or any gatherings, which in other families would take unquestioned precedence, can only be plotted after consultation. So football is regarded as a given disability that has to be worked around. If I were wheelchair-bound, nobody close to me would organise anything in a top-floor flat, so why would they plan anything for a winter Saturday afternoon.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from Fever Pitch
“It would be comforting if love were an energy source which continued to glow after our deaths.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
“The letter I received said you had need of my particular talents, but I must confess that I have so many talents that I am not sure which one you require.”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from What Really Happened in Peru
Oh. My. Gods.
The Secret Diary of...
American Born Chines...
Undaunted Courage: T...
The Stranger Beside...
Taran WandererBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
