We can’t choose where we come from, but we can choose where we go from there.

The popular short form is a condensation of this passage in the novel (Pocket Books / MTV Books, February 1999); the 2012 London edition has the passage word for word (the 2012 text has a comma after the opening ‘So’). Searched: the Internet Archive’s full text for ‘we can still choose where we go from there’.

In his last letter, written after he has been in the hospital, Charlie thinks about his family: his father told him he guessed he learned to drink on his own father’s knee. From there he comes to this conclusion about how people become who they are.

People are shaped by causes they cannot know or change, but what they do next is still theirs to choose, and they can try to be at peace with it.

Shared as a motivational line (self-help sites, graduation cards, memes) in the short form ‘We can’t choose where we come from, but we can choose where we go from there’, which is not a sentence of the book: the real passage is a tentative summing-up (‘I guess’, ‘maybe’, ‘we can try to feel okay’), not a promise of control. It is also Charlie’s conclusion about his parents, not Chbosky’s own statement.

• ShortenedWe can’t choose where we come from, but we can choose where we go from there. The shortened, tidied form in circulation; the book’s passage is longer and more hesitant. Where it was seen

Life, Hope, Freedom, Change, Wisdom

• I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together. (not found) Marilyn Monroe
• Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. Steve Jobs
• The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. (misattributed) Friedrich Nietzsche
• We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Oscar Wilde
• I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. Fyodor Dostoevsky

• archive.org/details/perksofbeingwall0000chbo_q6f6 (The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Simon & Schuster, London, 2012; OCR text via full-text search)
• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Perks_of_Being_a_Wallflower (lists the line, edition not named)
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perks_of_Being_a_Wallflower (first publication, February 1, 1999, Pocket Books / MTV Books)

“We can’t choose where we come from, but we can choose where we go from there.” Attributed to Stephen Chbosky. Not in these words. The idea is in The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999), Last letter, August 23, 1992 (placement inside the letter inferred, see checked), said by Charlie. Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/we-can-still-choose-where-we-go-from-there/ (checked 25 October 2026).

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