Jasmine

“If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“For it is precisely how I feel, who have inherited not measurable wealth but, as we all do who care for it, that immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground—and, inseparable from those wisdoms because demanded by them, the responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently. To enjoy, to question—never to assume, or trample. Thus the great ones (my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me—to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly. So here I am, walking on down the sandy path, with my wild body, with the inherited devotions of curiosity and respect.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“The labor of writing poems, of working with thought and emotion in the encasement (or is it the wings?) of language, is strange to nature, for we are first of all creatures of motion.”
― Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

“Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming