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"And for a moment, for a split second, everything else falls away, the whole pattern and order of my life, and a huge joy crests in my chest. I am no one, and I owe nothing to anybody, and my life is my own."
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"Maybe Lindsay and I are best friends and we hate each other, both. Maybe I'm only one math class away from being a slut like Anna Cartullo. Maybe I am like her, deep down. Maybe we all are: just one lunch period away from eating alone in the bathroom. I wonder if it's ever really possible to know the truth about someone else, or if the best we can do is just stumble into each other, heads down, hoping to avoid collision."
Friendship
"That's a funny thing: you think, when awful things happen, everything else just stops, like you would forget to pee and eat and get thirsty, but it's not really true. It's like you and your body are two separate things, like your body is betraying you, chugging on, idiotic and animal, craving water and sandwiches and bathroom breaks while your world falls apart."
Survival
"Let me tell you something about dying: it's not as bad as they says.it's the coming-back-to-life part that hurts."
Mortality
"Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you - sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever."
Time
"Lindsay calls them the Pugs: pretty from far away, ugly up close."
Truth
"Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging up your back and runing its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do-the only thing-is run."
Memory
"The DFA and organizations like it have pushed and squeezed and elbowed out all the feeling in the world. They have clamped their fists around a geyser to keep it from exploding.But the pressure eventually builds, and the explosion will always come."
Struggle
"It's the rule of the wilds. You must be bigger, and stronger, and tougher. A coldness radiates through me, a solid wall that is growing, piece by piece, in my chest. He doesn't love me.He never loved me.It was all a lie."The old Lena is dead." I say, and then push past him. Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone.You must hurt or be hurt."
Strength
"You should only fall in love with people who will fall in love with you back."
Romance
"They couldn't have known that even this was a lie-that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven't chosen at all.But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along."
Happiness
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"There comes a time in our life when we make ourselves a prisoner, we have to do everything possible to break ourselves free."
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Personal Development
"Education means breaking free from the manacles of limitations put forward by primitive ignorance."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is the people who cannot stand oppression that qualifies to fight today's modern slavery."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again."
Author Name
Personal Development
"He thinks he'll be remembered as the villain in the storyShe snorted."But I forgot to tell him, I said too quietly, opening the door, "that the villain is usually the person who locks up the maiden and throws away the key."Oh?I shrugged, "He was the one who let me out."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A bird cannot love freely when caged."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Grace of the Gnani' [the enlightened one] will take you to moksha [ultimate liberation] and 'Grace of God' will give you worldly happiness. God will not take you to moksha, because God cannot be realized without a 'Gnani' [the enlightened one], can he? He remains hidden."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Vitragta [a state of freedom from all worldly attachments] is the only way to 'swim' across lifetimes."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Do we all repeat the same words in our heads in the days after experiencing abuse at the hands of those who love us? "From this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, until death do us part."Maybe those vows weren't meant to be taken as literally as some spouses take them. For better, for worse?Fuck. That. Shit."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And for a moment, for a split second, everything else falls away, the whole pattern and order of my life, and a huge joy crests in my chest. I am no one, and I owe nothing to anybody, and my life is my own."
Author Name
Personal Development
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