
In the Arena.
Motivation & self worth
- Leslie Jamison
Vogue, 2/2018
"When I woke up the next morning, it was 10 min past the time I was supposed to have arrived at school, less than an hour before the start of my ceremony, and I couldn't find my shoes anywhere. I grabbed a pair of glittery silver heels by the door. They belonged to a stranger. I don't know what she must have thought when she woke up to find them gone, but I know that for me they became a kind of talisman: something strange and glittering under my somber black robes, these stolen disco shoes, the closing beat of a night I couldn't fully remember. They were proof that I was living beyond the boundaries of the predictable, the expected, the obedient, and the ordinary."
"[She] who struggled to reconcile her innate resolve with her lack of self-esteem."
- Julia Baird
Victoria, the Queen
"The only way home was now the way ahead. Henceforth France was before us, not behind us."
- Diary of a French explorer
Mad about the Mekong by John Keay
"There were many things you could be in the new America, but a coward was not one of them."