Wendelin Van Draanen Quotes

Life isn't easy, no matter where you are. You'll make choices you think are right, and then suffer for them.

I think anybody goes through a crisis of confidence from time to time. You have to kind of doubt yourself, sometimes. It's the way forward.

I like to think that we’re not defined by what happens to us…because so many times they’re beyond our control. I like to think that we’re defined by our choices and our decisions.

You seem to think you have a choice," Cam said. "But you have it backwards. Love chooses you. The shadow moves as the sun commands.

...life is in Fate's hands now. You made your choice to stay... it's too late to change that, so stop agonizing over it.... You're making my scales itch. Saphira, from "Eragon

Only you can determine your choice of attitude. Choose wisely, choose carefully, choose confidently!

Suffering is a privilege. It moves us toward thinking of essential things and shakes us out of complacency. Calamity cracks you open, moves you to change your ways.

Sometimes, everything in the world seems to be lined up against you. All the evidence says you ought to run the other way. Make the bravest choice, not the safest. It's not the best advice, but it's all I have to offer

But I still feel I waste a lot of time leaning on my elbow and thinking to myself, 'alright sucker, now what?'

I think there is something to being curious about your choices, but not wanting to kind of pierce the bubble of them, because it takes away from the act of discovering.

There are no answers, only choices.

Can love and peace live in the same heart? Youth is unhappy because it is faced with this terrible choice; love without peace, or peace without love.

I beg you both, take heart.'(Varys) 'Whose?' asked Tyrion sourly. He could think of several tempting choices.

I think, especially in this time in the world, there is very much a choice between fear and courage, and we all have to pick the courageous route.

It's not a field, I think, for people who need to have success every day: if you can't live with a nightly sort of disaster, you should get out. I wouldn't describe myself as lacking in confidence, but I would just say that the ghosts you chase you never catch.

We may have doubts, but we control the present. We always have the choice to move forward with hope and confidence.

If I die, I die friendless and abandoned. What choice did that leave him, but to live?

He should be the one to die, part of me thinks. I don't want to lose him, another part argues. I don't know which part to believe.

What would come, would come...and you would have to meet it, when it did.

How did I get here How did I end up in the arms of a boy I barely knew but knew I didn't want to lose I wondered what I would have thought of Andrius in Lithuania. Would I have liked him Would he have liked me

I close my eyes and I take a deep breath and I think about my life and how I ended up this way. I think about the ruin, devastation and wreckage I have caused to myself and to others. I think about self-hatred and self-loathing. I think about how and why and what happened and the thoughts come easily, but the answers don't.

I think the idea that in a riddle there are two answers or two doors and that you have to pick the right one is almost sort of delightful to kids who are making so many choices every day and who often don't know for a while if they've made the right one. It's not as if you make a choice and then *ding* you have some sense of "oh, this is perfect and I'm happy" - it's never that simple.

You can't think how I depend on you, and when you're not there the colour goes out of my life.

I remember asking myself one night, while I was curled up in the same old corner of my same old couch in tears yet again over the same old repetition of sorrowful thoughts, 'Is there ANYTHING about this scene you can change, Liz?' And all I could think to do was stand up, whle still sobbing, and try to balance on one foot in the middle of the living room. Just to prove that - while I couldn't stop the tears or change my dismal interior dialogue - I was not yet totally out of control: at least I could cry hysterically while balanced on one foot.

As I get older, I think that things have been pre-determined for me, whether I liked it or wanted it, wished for it, whatever, way before in some way. And with others, you do have a choice that you can change. And that choice that you make is still part of this grand scheme.