Leslie

“What matters is that you find the right person with whom to spend your time on this earth. Someone who will take care of you when you are sick. Who will love you and the extra hole in your head. Who will drive for hours while you sleep in the passenger seat. Someone who will show you how immense the universe is and still make you feel that you are the brightest thing in the sky.”
― Geraldine DeRuiter, All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft

“This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Striving is fine, as long as it’s tempered by the realization that, in an entropic universe, the final outcome is out of your control. If you don’t waste your energy on variables you cannot influence, you can focus much more effectively on those you can. When you are wisely ambitious, you do everything you can to succeed, but you are not attached to the outcome—so that if you fail, you will be maximally resilient, able to get up, dust yourself off, and get back in the fray. That, to use a loaded term, is enlightened self-interest.”
― Dan Harris, 10% Happier

“I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stick place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming