Richelle Mead Quotes

After boarding school in Switzerland, at, like, 14 or 15, my life clicked, and I just realized, 'I don't want to be like anyone around me at my school. I don't think the world revolves around money.'

I had been a girl of whom certain things were expected, none of them too bad: a career as a nurse, for example; a sense of duty to my parents; obedience to the law and worship of convention. But in one year of being away from home, that girl had gone out of existence.

Every child is simple, just a clean slate. Then the parents start writing on his slate - what he has to become. Then the teachers, the priests, the leaders - they all go on emphasizing that you have to become somebody; otherwise, you have wasted your life. Just the opposite is the case. You are a being. You need not become anybody else. That is the meaning of simplicity: remaining at ease with one's being, and not going on any track of becoming - which is unending.

If you spend too much time worrying about how other people perceive you, you'll never break the rules.

As the children get older and know what they want ... We all grew up at one point.

When we're growing up there are all sorts of people telling us what to do when really what we need is space to work out who to be.

There's no reason to change what you are, but if you're not being you, then you need to acknowledge that.

I like writing about teenagers because it's a time of great change and conflict. Up to then, you accept what your parents tell you.

In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.

If I have smashed the traditions, it was because I knew no traditions.

I love my family and I miss them very much but I'm a new person now. I know a lot of people will not agree with what I've done, but it was right for me.

When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.

I always tried so hard to fit in, and then I figured out that I didn't want to fit.

I know who I am by now. And I am my own brand.

When I stopped seeing my mother through the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself.

Everything I have experienced in my life helps form who I am today, and I would not change or forget any of it.

I think happiness comes from self-acceptance. We all try different things, and we find some comfortable sense of who we are. We look at our parents and learn and grow and move on. We change.

Part of the reason that I moved to Los Angeles is that even though my mom introduced me to all kinds of music, I really wanted to work on having my own identify, on being who I am and doing what I do, and seeing how people responded.

I needed to carve out my own place and find out what I was going to do.

All the characters on 'Girls' are growing and changing, which is how real people behave, especially when we're young, trying to figure out who we are, doing things that are the polar opposite of our characteristics.

Most of us were probably less than immaculately honest as teenagers; it's practically encoded into adolescence that you savor your secrets, dress in disguise, carve out some space for experiments and accidents and all the combustible lab work of becoming who you are.

Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: 'Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?'

I think there's a lot of pressure on young people to really be the thing that everyone is telling them that they are, opposed to discovering it for themselves.