Brooke Sharp

“Impossible to believe we need so much
as the world wants us to buy.
I have more clothes, lamps, dishes, paper clips
than I could possibly use before I die. Oh, I would like to live in an empty house,
with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass.
No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass. And I suppose sometime I will.
Old and cold I will lie apart
from all this buying and selling, with only
the beautiful earth in my heart.”
― Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early

“I've seen enough to know that you can be a human with a mountain of resources and you can be a human with nothing, and you can be a monster either way.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.” “You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air