Julie Harding

“I yelled to Scoty and crew, “Yooooo! What’s the plan?” “Whatcha mean, man?” “I’m saying, the plan, for today—what we doing?” “We here,” Scoty said, gesturing to the horizon. “I know, but what are we doing?” They all kind of look at one another. What does he mean? “I’m sayin’, y’all got some Jet Skis or something?” I say. “Like, what’s around here? What we gettin’ into?” “Look around, man,” Scoty called from the water, “we reconnectin’ and limin’.” What the fuck is “reconnectin’ ” and “limin’ ”? Roscoe and his mango had been watching the whole exchange. I went back inside, lay down on the couch, closed my eyes for another thirty minutes.”
― Will Smith, Will

“We had concluded that no one can make a person happy. You can make a person smile; you can compose a moment that helps a person to feel good; you can deliver a joke that makes a person laugh; you can create an environment where a person feels safe. We can and must be helpful and kind and loving, but whether a person is happy or not is utterly out of your control. Every person must wage a solitary internal war for their own contentment. We agreed that Jada’s happiness had to be her responsibility, and my happiness had to be my responsibility. We were going to seek our distinct, innermost personal joys, and then we were going to return and present ourselves to the relationship and to each other already happy—not coming to each other begging with empty cups, demanding the other person fulfill our needs. We felt that this vampiric relational model was unfair, unrealistic, destructive—even abusive. To place the responsibility for your happiness on anybody other than yourself is a recipe for misery.”
― Will Smith, Will

“The ebb and flow of the tide is the heartbeat of the planet. When they sit in the ocean all day, they are tuning themselves in to the frequency of the earth.”
― Will Smith, Will

“It won't be until much later, years from now, that I'll seek out other former homeschoolers, and realize how common, how deep this fear can run: to confront your homeschool teacher or to hurt them in ways they might never forgive is to risk losing not only a parents but also your entire childhood social sphere, the worldview in which you were raised. It is potentiallly an act of self-exile from a home country to which you can never again return, and maybe this fear is one reason why there still aren't proper regulations on homeschooling, why homeschool kids can still so easily vanish from the world. With the odds stacked so heavily against speaking out - and homeschooling still a relatively new phenomenon - so many of the necessary stories have not yet been told.”
― Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled: A Memoir