coming-of-age

Let this time in your life cut you open and drain all of the things that are holding you back. I__ going to help you forgive the things that you won__ let yourself forget.

I want to be the best version of myself for anyone who is going to someday walk into my life and need someone to love them beyond reason.

For so many years, I couldn__ understand why every time I thought that someone finally loved me, like_ for real, they would eventually turn to vapor. Every person whom I__e ever loved is trapped inside of my chest. I__e breathed all of them in so deeply that I__e nearly choked and died on every soul that I__e ever given myself to.

I met a boy whose eyes showed me that the past, present and future were all the same thing.

Don__ worry if people think you__e crazy. You are crazy. You have that kind of intoxicating insanity that lets other people dream outside of the lines and become who they__e destined to be.

I'm working hard to have a good life.You don't need fancy things to feel good. You can hug a puppy. You can buy a can of paint and surround yourself with color. You can plant a flower and watch it grow. You can decide to trust people, the right people. You can decide to start over and let other people start over, too.

Sometimes milestones are not measured by the accomplishments of society, but by those of integrity.

He's got all the pains of being lost and all the benefits of being told where to go. He wants it the other way around.

Vane grabbed me. __uLac, let__ chat._ British-speak for __tand still while I yell at you.

Ribs closing on his heart, Will battled internal sirens whose song he couldn__ yet decipher. During his childhood, __in_ had been such an abstract word. It denoted getting your Sunday best dirty and torn, or lying to have your brother punished for things you__ done yourself. But now, on the cusp of adulthood, the word seemed to grow and change, to acquire terrifying shades of darkness. He was beginning to understand that there was more to it. That there were things the human body longed for that were infinitely worse than playing in mud and telling fibs.

If there's something I'm not good at, it's usually because I just organically despise it. I can't help that. I'm fabulous at too many other things to waste my time faking it.

I'm a woman, Aleksey. I'm not the simplistic, flawless creature the world expects me to be. I'm imperfect, I'm multidimensional. I make mistakes all the time and I'll make even more as life challenges me. And I don't want to be afraid of messing things up. Firstly because I'll learn from my mistakes, but more importantly, they're what make me human.

But for a long time, and probably far too long, I had a secret wish: the adolescently romantic idea that there was someone out there for me; someone I hadn't met yet who would ask me on a date and make sense of my life. I harbored the hope, I'm now embarrassed to admit, that like a girl in a Lifetime movie, I would look into someone's eyes and find a reflection of my inner life. But sometime between my teenage years and the first years in New York, that idea had pretty well evaporated. I'd grown up.

I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board.

There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

Matt was almost completely naked. A tattered loincloth and an ugly chain with a yellow diamond were his only apparel.

Creativity is the catalyst to the future.

You don't have to go back to the way things were. Just go back to the point where you left off. Don't start over... just keep going, but there's a right way of keeping going. And no one here is going to be angry at you for leaving. We all have to leave sometimes. And some of us never come back. But there's always a choice, even if you've already decided never to return. You can still come back from this. That is the only kind of faith that matters. Not in the world, not in...God..., not in our friendship... just in yourself.