Mariethethird

“I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“To pass as an American, I always had to question the law. Not just break it, not just circumvent it, but question it. I had to interrogate how laws are created, how illegality must be seen through the prism of who is defining what is legal for whom. I had to realize that throughout American history, legality has forever been a construct of power.”
― Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen