you're handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It's all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary.

— Chuck Palahniuk

Your hard-won triumphs can be wholly negated if you live in a climate where your victories are seen as threatening, incorrect, distasteful, or -- most crucially of all, for a teenage girl -- simply uncool. Few girls would choose to be right -- right, down into their clever, brilliant bones -- but lonely.

— Caitlin Moran

Your personal declaration of will is the first step in a seemingly impossible journey.

— Bryant McGill

Your personality of the mind is like a castle of sand around the sea. The time you begin to disassociate yourself with different experiences and impressions of both the external and internal world, you won’t find anything inside.

— Roshan Sharma

Your power is in your individuality, in being exactly who you area.

— Jennifer Lopez

You should never make fun of something that a person can't change about themselves.

— Phil Lester

You shouldn't want to be like everyone else. Then you wouldn't be like you.

— Cristina Henriquez

You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.

— Colson Whitehead

You were born an original work of art. Stay original.

— Suzy Kassem

You yearn to stay in this in-between place, where the beauty of the times you have freshly bid farewell to is still alive and vivid in your mind – almost real – and the reality of your new circumstances has yet to fully sink in. You listen to the familiar melodies that had accompanied you on your journey, and allow the music to evoke landscapes and scenes in your mind. The songs caress your sub-consciousness and fill your being with an airy joy. You are both here and elsewhere. Or perhaps you are everywhere and nowhere.

— Agnes Chew