Celena > Recent Status Updates

We meet Lintang, son of a illiterate fisherman, foreshadowed to be the most brilliant person Ikal will ever meet.

Indonesia: nine hopeful students present themselves on the threshold of Muhammadiyah Elementary. To stay open they need ten students. Bu Mus, their newly-graduated fifteen year old teacher is apprehensive. The principal, Pak Harfan has prepared a closing speech in case...

You do not write your life in words. You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do. -Lots to agree and disagree with there.

Stories are wild creatures. When you let them loose, who knows what havoc they might wreak?

Stories are the wildest things of all.

I'm telling you, this so-called 'prosperity' is going to be the downfall of Asia! Each generation becomes lazier than the next. They think they can make overnight fortunes by flipping properties and getting hot tips in the stock market. Ha! Nothing lasts forever and when this boom ends these youngsters won't know what hit them!

No matter how advanced we've become, there's still tremendous pressure for girls to get married. Here, it doesn't matter how successful a woman is professionally. She isn't considered complete until she is married and gas children.

Jeffrey tells Charlie on way to Mad Jack Lionel's house "if you want to be brave, you've got to be smart and you've got to be prepared and you've got to know shit."

Cooking is conducting, knowing when each piece comes in and how strong.

Holding onto something doesn't make it yours. You realise at some point you've just keeping it back for yourself, because it's pulling away with equal force. - Charlie on childhood, coming of age, confession, leaving town, Eliza, Jasper.

Recurring bad luck and chance.

I don't understand a thing about this world: about people, and why they do the things they do. The more I find out, the more I uncover, the more I know, the less I understand.

A poor pip-spitter always blames his melon.

Every character in every story is buffeted between good and bad, between right and wrong. But it's good people who can tell the difference, who know when they've crossed the line. And it's a hard and humbling gesture, to take blame and admit fault. You've got to get brave to say it and mean it. Sorry.

And I know I'll be all right. Because I got a good heart, and f* this town for makin me try to believe otherwise.

But, see, that's what I reckon God really is, Charlie. It's that part inside me that's stronger and harder than anything else. And I reckon prayer is just trustin in it, havin faith in it, just askin myself to be tough.

Everyone can learn a trade and pay taxes and have a family. But that's not growin up. It's about how you act when your shit gets shaken up, it's about how much you see around you. That's what makes a man.

Corrugated is described as a "town of barnacles. A cluster of hard shells that suck themselves stuck and clench themselves shut and choose not to know about dying.

How thin is the line? His it something we all have in us? It is just a matter of time and pressure? It is shit luck and a poor lot? Is it time and chance?...Maybe Mark Twain knows.

I think it's harder for me to get brave. Does that mean it's easier for Jasper Jones than me? But what about Jeffrey Lu? I don't know. Maybe he's the bravest out of all of us.

Mark Twain quote used: courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.