Page 131: "'The credit belongs to the person who is actually in the area, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again... and who at the worst, if she fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that her place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.'"
Page 153: "While I appreciate the convenience of electronic versions, I love real books, the smell of them, the way they feel in my hands."
Page 182: "...not caring is the end of a meaningful life. To be cynical about everything is a sad way to live. I don't want to doubt; I want to believe. I want to feel passionate about something." "...it feels good to feel something. And it's something I can share with other people."
Page 183: "...where all of the things that make us different fall away and we can talk for hours... for a few minutes, or an hour,...for that brief amount of time, I feel less alone in the world."
Page 189: "The idea that someone can find his or her talent--and passion--and pursue it to the nth degree..."
Page 190: "...having a passion can help you to live...He gets an opportunity to follow his passion and it takes him places. That [movie] makes me think if I could only figure out what I'm interested in, I could excel at something." "Sometimes I don't know what I think until I talk or write about it." "...in a good book, the author comes to life. You feel like he's talking to you, directly to you, answering your questions and thinking your thoughts... Good books feel personal...Reading is a cure for loneliness."
Page 194: "You don't have to be good yet. You just have to keep at it. Build your strength, increase your endurance..."
Page 195: "It's the act of catching yourself before you fall... Sometimes you might fall... But you brush yourself off and keep going."
Page 220: "There are some stories that are better told while moving forward."
Page 225: "You're a link in a chain. Connect to other people and connect them to each other."
Page 273: "How he'd helped me to refocus my life, to learn to enjoy things and give up being tortured by my own competitiveness."
Page 297: "When I look at the people I most admire, many of them have experienced something that looks like failure. But when you take the time to exercise your powers of vision with more imaginative strength, to peer deep into the curves and shifts of how real lives are lived, you see that what happens when you fail is that you get an opportunity to think harder, to think differently."
Page 299: "...the way to change the world--is for each of us to learn to embrace being wrong."
Page 300: "I want to throw myself into the world and at new things." "I may be a reject. But I am not a failure. At least, not as long as I keep trying."
