If you end up living on your own, then live that way fully.
Whatever happens, you have to learn independence. You have to be strong. You cannot keep looking for someone to arrange everything for you. Put your attention into work, or learn early how to make money, or practice being around strangers, or simply remain in your own world without interruption. Hold on to your own style. Don’t let just anyone reshape you.
Learn to choose for yourself, decide for yourself, think for yourself. Be responsible to yourself.
Live neither for anyone else nor for their gaze, nor for their gossip.
There is no better domestic film this year than War of Internet Addiction. None. That scene where people raise their hands and shout—it is enough to make your eyes burn with tears. All that dissatisfaction with reality, with society, with oneself, suddenly finds a way out there, a channel for release.
I used to wonder whether someone like that really exists—someone whose values would not shift no matter how chaotic the surroundings became. Someone who could stay unstained in the mud, clear without becoming affected by what grows around them.
Or maybe it is not that such a person does not exist. Maybe you simply have not met the right person in the right place, or encountered the right event that would call that part of you into action.
In those dreams of constant running, your clean hands remain connected to your heart, set there by you for many years. These things that are linked, these people that are linked, reflect an intimate kind of loneliness. Before sleep and after waking, ask every name: which one of us is able to comfort another?
A single “Here, take it” is worth more than two sentences of “I’ll give it to you later.” Promises, before they are fulfilled, are lies by default.
And no matter how rich someone is, no matter how good-looking they are, if they love to complain, thank them politely, wish them happiness for the rest of their life, and then stop contacting them.
People who complain always want company in their complaining. Listening to them is a waste of time, but worse than that, their mood seeps into you. You become more pessimistic, less motivated, less willing to move forward.
Live Not By Lies.
Google once had the creed “Don’t be evil,” and lies are among the greatest forms of evil. Human beings who can tell three lies in ten minutes—there is something deeply sad in that.
If possible, do a few things well first. Learn English, so you have fewer chances to be misled by poor translations. Learn how to get past barriers, so you are not trapped into hearing only one side and believing only one version. Learn to listen instead of searching only for things that confirm what you already think. Learn to argue with reasons and evidence, not with denunciation.
The people who sharpen themselves desperately just to be noticed are often lonely, and a little exhausting.
Meanwhile, those who are self-centered, fail to get attention, and yet remain intensely narcissistic often seem strangely happy.
Life is like a browser without a BACK button. Once you click a link, you cannot truly go back.
Some people say there are always other links that can take you back to where you started—you just have to take a longer, more roundabout path. Life can be like that too.
But I have always felt that once you move forward, you never really return.
Some women do not strike you as especially beautiful when they are young. Shu Qi, for example. Looking again later, though, there is suddenly a kind of beauty so startling it feels like your eyes might roll right out onto the street.
The things we appreciate keep changing. Which only proves something simple: nothing stays the same forever.