“To anybody who has ever questioned your identity – ever, ever, ever, ever – or you find yourself living in the gray spaces, I promise you this: There is indeed a place for us.”  --Ariana DeBose said this during her acceptance speech for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing Anita in West Side Story. She was the first Afro-Latina and first out queer woman of color to win an acting Oscar.

"Happiness is a simple, frugal heart."  --Nikos Kazantzakis

“The holy man is he who takes your soul and will and makes them his. When you choose your holy man, you surrender your will. You give it to him in utter submission, in full renunciation.”  --Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov 

“Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…”  --Jonathan Swift, “The Examiner" (1710)

"In the depths of Winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."  --Albert Camus

"There is only one success... to be able to spend your life in your own way."  --Christopher Morley 

"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness."  --Ludwig Wittgenstein