Quotes from North of Beautiful

“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

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Popular quotes

“Sam found a chair under Robin’s butt and evicted him from it, bringing it over to his pregnant wife.“Sorry, I wasn’t thinking,” Robin apologized.
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“Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness.”
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“When people raised families in that sterile environment, it produced directionless children who became directionless teenagers, then directionless adults. With no roots, no past to stand on, you got hollow kids. The United States was full of rootless, empty kids who played video games all day. In between, they skateboarded down immaculate sidewalks past yards that had never known a weed. And if you looked into their eyes, you didn’t see a dream of the future there, just a weird emptiness. Max didn’t know what the answer was; all he knew was that somewhere along the line, they’d all taken a wrong turn. Max”
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“For Robert the experience was another step in education. He was learning in particular that patriotic declarations did not make due process of law superfluous and that he owed a debt to his own inner standards.”
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“Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is? - our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?...

Take away the bomb threat and what are we? Ordinary beads on a never-ending string. Our time is a routine twist of an improbable yarn...There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening...
Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy - probably a necessary lie - that these are crucial times, and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?”
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