Quotes from Justina Chen Headley

There is real comfort in being quiet.

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.

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?

I wondered about her chicken-and-egg relationship with Dad. Which came first? Her helplessness or his controlling?

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.

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.

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.

Jolie laide = "pretty ugly" Draws you to it...bored into heart and mind.

What was so miraculous about a relationship that was based more on my gratitude than on mutual self respect?

Maybe we don't have the same definition of about what's beautiful. So define it. Define true beauty.

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.

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.

You don't need a geochache for this one." "You don't, huh?" "Nope.. here I am. Here I am.

You would be surprised what two hours of daily exercise and five hundred stomach crunches can do for you.

My confidence was of the hothouse variety, carefully cultivated under highly regulated conditions. One wrong look, one mean comment, and my facade would wither.

But even quashed rebellions leave us different. Because freedom may be a forbidden fruit in tyrannies, but once tasted, it is unforgettable.

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.

You know, sometimes the most direct route isn't the right one. - Jacob

No power was total, no power permanent, no power absolute.

Hey, if it's a good philosophy, it works. Death is imminent. Live every day like it's your last.

If there was one thing I refused to be, it was an insignificant footnote in some boy's history.

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.

Ever the collector of treasure maps that promised the world but led nowhere.

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.