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.
He knew me in all the ways that truly mattered: the shape of my fears, the contours of my dreams.
To dream is to starve doubt, feed hope.
Flawed, we’re truly interesting, truly memorable, and yes, truly beautiful.
Come on, don’t you ever stop and smell the coffee?
Because freedom may be a forbidden fruit in tyrannies, but once tasted, it is unforgettable.
Adventure in life is good; consistency in coffee even better.
Forgiving others is easier when I remember that I’m human and stupid, too.
You raze the old to raise the new.
Physical beauty wasn’t the same as True Beauty, any more than pretty ugly meant truly ugly or Magnetic North meant True North.
When the creative impulse sweeps over you, grab it. You grab it and honor it and use it, because momentum is a rare gift.
I didn’t know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.
You would be surprised what two hours of daily exercise and five hundred stomach crunches can do for you.
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?
If Jacob was right and clothes were costumes and makeup a mask, then our attitudes and habits must be our shields.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My confidence was of the hothouse variety, carefully cultivated under highly regulated conditions. One wrong look, one mean comment, and my facade would wither.