1050 – “Everyone’s got a gift inside of us, and in all honesty, the pursuit of normality is the ultimate sacrifice of potential. The chance for greatness, progress, and change dies the moment we try to be someone else.”

-Faith Jegede

961 – “Someone I loved gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

-Mary Oliver

920 – “I have a talent for silence and brevity. I can keep silent when it seems best to do so, and when I speak I can, and do usually, quit when I am done. This talent, or these two talents, I have cultivated. Silence and concise, brief speaking have got me some laurels, and, I suspect, lost me some. No odds. Do what is natural to you, and you are sure to get all the recognition you are entitled to.”

-Rutherford B Hayes, 19th President of the United States of America

814 – Jane Smiley on Books

“An inexpensive paperback book from a reputable publisher is a small, rectangular, boxlike object a few inches long, a few inches wide, and an inch or so thick. It is easy to stack and store, easy to buy, keep give away, or throw away. As an object, it is user-friendly and routine, a mature technological form, hard to improve upon and easy to like. Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”

–Jane Smiley

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700 – “Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it’s much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!”

–Neil Gaiman

309 – “The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world. Individuality is cherished and nurtured, because, in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry your gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others.”

–Robin Wall Kimmerer

283 – “In some parts of the world, students are going to school every day. It’s their normal life. But in other parts of the world, we are starving for education… it’s like a precious gift. It’s like a diamond.”

–Malala Yousafzai

130 – “If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become.”

– Robin Wall Kimmerer