Top 40 Justina Chen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Adventure in life is good; consistency in coffee even better.”

— Justina Chen

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2. “Getting lost is just another way of saying ’going exploring.”

— Justina Chen

3. “There is real comfort in being quiet.”

— Justina Chen

4. “You raze the old to raise the new.”

— Justina Chen

5. “Silence, too, can be torture.”

— Justina Chen

6. “You can see beauty in everything, except for yourself.”

— Justina Chen

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “Hey, if it’s a good philosophy, it works. Death is imminent. Live every day like it’s your last.”

— Justina Chen

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “I preferred my brand of beauty where Norah was more beautiful than any bimbette, and Mom was beautiful whether sized extra-small or extra-large. Where Peony could look at herself in the mirror and murmur, wow, look at me. Just look at me.”

— Justina Chen

15. “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

16. “Come on, don’t you ever stop and smell the coffee?”

— Justina Chen

17. “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

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

— Justina Chen

19. “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

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

— Justina Chen

21. “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

22. “Forgiving others is easier when I remember that I’m human and stupid, too.”

— Justina Chen

23. “To dream is to starve doubt, feed hope.”

— Justina Chen

24. “Flawed, we’re truly interesting, truly memorable, and yes, truly beautiful.”

— Justina Chen

25. “You know, sometimes the most direct route isn’t the right one. – Jacob.”

— Justina Chen

26. “I didn’t know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.”

— Justina Chen

27. “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

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

— Justina Chen

29. “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

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

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

32. “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

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

— Justina Chen

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

— Justina Chen

35. “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

36. “Isn’t it funny that what the Japanese authors consider their first page is our happily-ever-after last one? When you think about it, it’s not a bad way to approach life. What appears to be an ending – heartbreaking wounds that you can and cannot see – may just be a beginning, a start of a brand-new adventure.”

— Justina Chen

37. “Because freedom may be a forbidden fruit in tyrannies, but once tasted, it is unforgettable.”

— Justina Chen

38. “No power was total, no power permanent, no power absolute.”

— Justina Chen

39. “If Jacob was right and clothes were costumes and makeup a mask, then our attitudes and habits must be our shields.”

— Justina Chen

40. “Safe, I decided, didn’t leave much room for fun.”

— Justina Chen

41. “That’s exactly why nature always trumps gardens. Gardens are just reality pruned of chaos. What doesn’t work you rip out.”

— Justina Chen

42. “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

43. “You know, there are easier ways to meet a guy than to run him over.”

— Justina Chen