Justina Chen - North of beautiful (2009)

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

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

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

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

Justina Chen
You know, there are easier ways to meet a guy than to run him over.

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

Justina Chen
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.

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

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

Justina Chen
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
Adventure in life is good; consistency in coffee even better.

Justina Chen
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