Nicole Grace

“But my experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantastic -- an orc, troll, or gorgon...This was the attempt to commit a shameful act while escaping all sanction, and I raise it to show you that there was no golden era when evildoers did their business and loudly proclaimed it as such.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“you are a Daughter of the Sun, / And you belong only to yourself, not to this world.”
― Nikita Gill

“Unknowing before the heavens of my life/ I stand in wonder. O the great stars./ The rising and the going down. How quiet./ As if I didn't exist. Am I part? Have I dismissed/ the pure influence? Do high and low tide/ alternate in my blood according to this order?/ I will cast off all wishes, all other links,/ accustom my heart to its remotest space. Better/ it live in the terror of its stars than/ seemingly protected, soothed by something near.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems