"I am falling, tumbling through the air, but this time the darkness is alive around me, full of beating things, and I realize that I'm not surrounded by dark but have only had my eyes closed all this time. I open them, feeling silly, and at the same time a hundred thousand butterlies take off around me, so many of them in so many brilliant colors they are like a solid rainbow, temporarily obscuring the sun. But as they wing higher and higher they reveal a landscape below us, all green and gold and sun-drenched fields and pink-tinged clouds drifting underneath me, and the air around me is clear and blue and sweet smelling, and I'm laughing, laughing, laughing as I spin through the air because, of course, I haven't been falling all the time.I've been flying."
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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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"You are special person. Seek to develop your talents."
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Personal Development

"Im happy to sit and be an ear to listen when the world gets wild but Id much prefer to watch the ways your eyes in sparkle in the midst of convincing me why you love the things you do. It gives me hope that someone else out there feels everything with this much depth and has the willingness to create a beautiful life from it."
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Personal Development

"Inspiration is the power of the soul."
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Personal Development

"You were not born to make only a living but to live life."
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Personal Development

"The living has a great hope, we have life to bounce back from any difficulty. The dead had no hope."
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Personal Development

"Seek knowledge. Learning has no end. Learning makes you forever young."
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Personal Development

"It is through strength of character, not luck, do we form the predictable path of our future."
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Personal Development

"PhD is possible at any age!"
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Personal Development

"To strive in life, we must either read or write a story."
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Personal Development
