“I've had enough of this life of waiting for someone's permission.”

“He said my dream doesn't mean I am crazy, only that I should probably love myself a little better, like most people.”

“She had given her heart permission to be vulnerable, risking the potential of it being broken into a million pieces.”

“I have, for my own projected works and ideas, only the silliest and dewiest of hopes; no matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life’s fabric, to the world’s beauty.... [S]imply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful!”

“Life isn't just a sequence of waiting for things to be done.”

“What I didn't understand, all those years when I was waiting for my life to start, was that it had already started. I was already living it! Those were the most important years, and I didn't even know it.”

“At seventeen I'm waiting for my life to actually begin. I'm afraid I'll wake up tomorrow eighty years old and I WILL STILL BE WAITING.”