20 Quotes By Tavi Gevinson That Will Make You Want To Drop Everything And Follow Your Passions

1. I think that when you make yourself vulnerable, the thing that you do next is better. It’s not like you have to inflict pain on yourself in order to make yourself better, but I think it helps. The thing that bonds you to a new friend isn’t that you went to a fun party; it’s ‘cause you had a really weird, sad conversation.

2. Women are complicated. Not because women are crazy, but because people are crazy, and women just happen to be people.

3. I think everybody should go to high school…It’s horrible, and it unites you with other people.

4. The best cure for procrastination is to have so much on your plate that procrastination is no longer an option.

5. [On journaling] …so for every new journal I would change the way my room looked and change the posters on the walls and I would change what I was wearing and I would have a playlist, and it all kind of corresponded and matched, and I would change my handwriting in the journals.

6. For most people, being a feminist sounds so complicated. It’s always more convenient to not be someone with controversial opinions.

7. [On being interviewed] Sometimes, when you’re doing a magazine interview, it’s good to remember that you are not, actually, the center of the universe. Like, at all.

8. There’s danger in glorifying negative emotions as fuel for art.

9. The idea that feeling confident and feeling misunderstood are mutually exclusive really bugs me.

10. [On her high school breakup] And actually, coming out of the breakup has kind of reignited my love for fashion, because it’s a way of asserting a new identity and becoming a new person and giving yourself space.

11. I think you have to take the approach that feminism is ultimately about freedom.

12. I understand that a lot of girls feel encouraged by what I have been able to do, but I’ve never felt like I’m a role model. I’m not concerned with building a great legacy or anything because I’ll be dead, so it won’t matter.

13. I try not to do anything I don’t like, so I stay motivated pretty easily.

14. There are moments when I am really not happy with how I look, or I think it would be an easy way out to try and do the conventionally attractive thing. But part of it is that I don’t have the energy to put on, like, makeup. If people want to do that, that’s fine. But I’ve learned that it’s not for me.

15. Creating content that interests you allows your enthusiasm to show and engage readers in an insincere space like the Internet.

16. It just made more sense to me to be a feminist than to not be a feminist.

17. You need to give yourself permission to change.

18. If you are intimidated by the artists who came before you, understand you too have a place, right next to them.

19. …personal style is an opportunity to kind of create your own fantasy. And that can be — and this word is so overused — but empowering in a way, especially when you feel like you have a certain force field around you to the outside world.

20. My goofiest-sounding secret is that I also believe in magic. Sometimes I call it God and sometimes I call it light, and I believe in it because every now and then I read a really good book or hear a really good song or have a really good conversation with a friend and they seem to have some kind of shine to them. The list I keep of these moments in the back of my journal is comprised less of times when I was laughing or smiling and more of times when I felt like I could feel the colors in my eyes deepening from the display before me. Times in which I felt I was witnessing an all-encompassing representation of life driven by an understanding that, coincidence or not, our existence is a peculiar thing, and perhaps the greatest way to honor it is to just be human. To be happy AND sad, and everything else. And yeah, living is a pain, and I say I hate everyone and everything, and I don’t exude much enthusiasm when sandwiched between fluorescent lighting and vinyl flooring for seven hours straight, and I will probably mumble a bunch about how much I wish I could sleep forever the next time I have to wake up at 6 AM. But make no mistake about it: I really do like living. I really, truly do.