Justina Chen Headley > 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 Headley, North of Beautiful

“Getting lost is just another way of saying 'going exploring.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“To dream is to starve doubt, feed hope.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“Flawed, we're truly interesting, truly memorable, and yes, truly beautiful.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

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

“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 Headley, North of Beautiful

“Adventure in life is good; consistency in coffee even better.”
― Justina Chen Headley, 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 Headley, 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 Headley, 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 Headley, 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 Headley, North of Beautiful

“Come on, don't you ever stop and smell the coffee?”
― Justina Chen Headley, 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 Headley, 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 Headley, 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 Headley, 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 Headley, 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 Headley, 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 Headley, 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 Headley, 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 Headley, 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 Headley, North of Beautiful

“You raze the old to raise the new.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“You know, there are easier ways to meet a guy than to run him over.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“I didn't know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.”
― Justina Chen Headley

“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 Headley, North of Beautiful

“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.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“Jolie laide = "pretty ugly"
Draws you to it...bored into heart and mind.”
― Justina Chen Headley, 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 Headley, North of Beautiful

“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 Headley, North of Beautiful

“You don't need a geochache for this one."
"You don't, huh?"
"Nope.. here I am. Here I am.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“Safe, I decided, didn't leave much room for fun.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“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 Headley, North of Beautiful

“There is real comfort in being quiet.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“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.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“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 Headley, North of Beautiful

“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 Headley, North of Beautiful

“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 Headley, North of Beautiful

“What was so miraculous about a relationship that was based more on my gratitude than on mutual self respect?”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“No power was total, no power permanent, no power absolute.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“You would be surprised what two hours of daily exercise and five hundred stomach crunches can do for you.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“But even quashed rebellions leave us different. Because freedom may be a forbidden fruit in tyrannies, but once tasted, it is unforgettable.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“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 Headley, North of Beautiful

“I didn't have the language to communicate that to this little girl -- or to communicate that 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 Headley, 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 Headley, North of Beautiful

“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 Headley, Nothing But the Truth [and a few white lies]

“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 Headley, North of Beautiful

“There is a time to study a map passionately, obsessively. To see where you've gone, where others have gone before you. To commit to memory every obstacle, every danger. Shakespeare had a term for this obsession: mappery. But there is a time, too, when you say, come dragons. I challenge you to find me.”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“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 Headley, Nothing But the Truth [and a few white lies]

“I wondered about her chicken-and-egg relationship with Dad. Which came first? Her helplessness or his controlling?”
― Justina Chen Headley, North of Beautiful

“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 Headley, North of Beautiful