Erin Ceja

“Where you are today is not where you have to be forever. You may not want to embrace where you are, but it is so incredibly important for you to embrace who you are. You get to choose. While you can’t control everything in your life, you can do at least one thing: every day you get to choose to honor you. There will never be another person who will grace the face of this earth who is like you. There are people whom only you can love, places that only you can go, and things that only you can do the way that you would do them. You have the opportunity to choose every day to honor the loveliness that you uniquely bring to the world, even if the world doesn’t seem to be holding up its end of the bargain to bring the lovely to you.”
― Chrystal Evans Hurst, She's Still There: Rescuing the Girl in You

“As long as you look for someone else to validate who you are by seeking their approval, you are setting yourself up for disaster. You have to be whole and complete in yourself. No one can give you that. You have to know who you are - what others say is irrelevant.”
― Nic Sheff

“In no particular order, I read what I could, sometimes with Fadiman as my docent, sometimes not: Flaubert, Twain, Kerouac, Brontë, Kafka, Camus, Ibsen, James, Thurber, Shakespeare. But in the course of reading great books, something happened. My reading molded me, the tool hammering its hand into shape. By some miracle—and by miracle, I mean great teachers—I pushed past the shallowness and stupidity of my own motivations. I fell in love with the actual literature and the actual ideas of great literature. As an immigrant, as a Vietnamese kid, as a poor kid, I had collected so many scarlet letters of alienation that I connected profoundly to the great works. As I read, I began to understand that all the great works wrangled with big questions, important questions: our place in the world, the value of our experience, the fairness and meaning of our suffering, our quest for love and belonging. Universal themes bound these great works together, and they bound me to their oaky, yellowed pages like Odysseus lashed to the mast of his ship. I felt a connective and humanizing resonance in books: I wasn’t alone in my aloneness. I wasn’t alone in my longing for love. I wasn’t alone in my fear of being rejected, my fear of never finding my place, my fear of failing. The snarl of my journey was untangled and laid out clearly by books.”
― Phuc Tran, Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In