"Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That’s its balance."

"Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will."

"The less I needed, the better I felt."

"For something to be beautiful it doesn’t have to be pretty."

"And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does."

"What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are — underneath the year that makes you eleven.

Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three.

Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is."

"The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."

"I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once"

"What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past."

"Don’t say goodbye because goodbye means going away, and going away means forgetting."

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."

"I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it."

"Beautiful people are not always good but good people are always beautiful"