Sara Graves

“The tangling of so much cruelty and beauty has made of my life a strange, discordant landscape. It has left me with an awareness that haunts the edges of my vision—it can all be lost in a moment—but it’s also given me a jeweler’s eye. If I’m thinking about my illness—abstracted from its impact on the people around me—then the answer is: No, I would not reverse my diagnosis if I could. I would not take back what I suffered to gain this.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“We’ve been complicit—not out of malice but because we have been groomed and raised in a system of racial injustice that has relied on our obliviousness and/or apathy to maintain its uninterrupted operation”
― Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

“Right relationship is knowing that we are interconnected and finding a form of connection that allows us peace. Sometimes right relationship means reentering each other’s lives. Sometimes it means staying apart.”
― Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

“I realized what was stopping me: an inflated sense of self-importance. I was acting as though things would fall apart without me, that others could not do the work as well as I could. But, really, I was just terrified that I would no longer have worth if I shifted from doing to being. I had grown so accustomed to the breathlessness of crises that paying attention to my own breath in my body was the new frightening thing. It was time to find the bravery to surrender my ego and equip others to lead.”
― Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love