M.G.

“We should strive to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“I've spent time with a lot of very busy people: business leaders, prominent journalists, multiple presidents. Despite the unusually high demands on their schedules, something they all have in common is that they carve out time for reading, and for consuming information that may not seem to have anything to do with their jobs. When President Obama released summer reading lists or his top book recommendations for the year, a chorus of 'yeah, right' could occasionally be heard from certain corners of the internet, where skeptics who doubted he had time to read contemporary literature liked to hang out. But President Obama read all those books, and many more. Taking time after a long day to sit down and read some Chinese science fiction, a novel by Jesmyn Ward, or even one of Ron Chernow's biographies was an escape, but it also oxygenated Obama's brain. There may not have been a specific moment when he consciously connected the dots between a novel he read two years earlier and the issue at hand, but moving beyond your own experience is an important part of developing the kind of perspective that helps with decision-making. It's also how the most effective people connect. Developing broad general knowledge gives you the flexibility to adapt to your audience on the fly, as well as the ability to naturally relate to diverse groups. And besides, have you ever recommended a book to someone who ended up really loving it? It's a unique way of understanding someone better, and that kind of communication goes both ways.”
― Jen Psaki, Say More: Lessons from Work, the White House, and the World

“what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“In the end, we must trust the path we choose to walk, anchored by a firm sense of our potential, inspired by the people with whom we surround ourselves, and bolstered by our willingness to keep on. As I often tell the young people I talk to, including my own college-age daughters, ordinary humans can do extraordinary things. So go ahead, and dream as enormously and as courageously as you can. If you are diligent and well-prepared, relentlessly optimistic, and resolute in purpose, you will be capable of creating a brilliant future for yourself. And, as my own life has shown, no matter where we began our journey, or the missteps we will surely make along the way, we must press forward, girded by our blessings and strengthened by our hardships, whether we are laboring quietly outside the spotlight, or in full view on a public stage, we are, each of us, called to write our story in the chronicle of history, too.”
― Ketanji Brown Jackson, Lovely One: A Memoir