Discworld, the fictional universe that bestselling author Sir Terry Pratchett created for his 41-book fantasy series of the same name, is nothing if not a chance to see the world differently. His imaginative universe is a flat disc carried on the backs of four elephants who are all standing on the back of a turtle. On Pratchett’s website, Discworld is described as “a parallel time and place which might sound and smell very much like our own, but which looks completely different.” That description gets at the heart of this quote, from Pratchett’s book “A Hat Full of Sky.” When you leave a place you’ve known forever and experience something new, it changes both you and that place. You return to something familiar, but it looks different because your perspective has changed. Leaving and coming home again expands your worldview, much more than staying put ever would.

Tyra Banks signed with one of the world’s top modeling agencies at the age of 17, and walked in 25 fashion shows in her first season before going on to star in music videos, TV shows, and films. A successful businesswoman, she also created her own production company (Bankable Productions) and started a foundation for disadvantaged girls. In 2003, Banks signed on as the host and executive producer of “America’s Next Top Model,” which ran for 24 cycles and was among the highest-rated shows on television at the time. On the show, Banks mentored aspiring models and often voiced her opinion that “perfect is boring.” This simple quote encourages all people to embrace their unique characteristics, the ones that set them apart and make them truly beautiful. 

A self-proclaimed "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Audre Lorde was born in Harlem in 1934 and went on to become an internationally recognized activist and artist. This quote, from an interview with literary critic Claudia Tate in 1982, demonstrates the authenticity with which Lorde interacted with the world. She went on to say: “We must key into those feelings and begin to extrapolate from them, examine them for new ways of understanding our experiences. This is how new visions begin, how we begin to posit a new future nourished by the past.” It is only by understanding our emotions that we can begin to formulate the change we wish to see in ourselves, and beyond.    

Venturing into the world is often seen as a rite of passage, whether it’s leaving the family home or moving to a different continent. For MacArthur Genius Grant recipient and award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, leaving her home country of Nigeria to live in the United States, and traveling around the world to promote her books, began a journey to find herself. Whether a sense of wanderlust is inherent in us or not, exploring beyond the life we know, filled with familiar people, is one path to discovering who we really are — which elements of our cultural identity fit and which we prefer to leave behind. As Adichie observed, it’s the journey that helps us find who we are, and discover where home really is. 

It’s almost mind-boggling to think that John Keats lived to just 25 years old. By the time of his death in 1821, he had produced poems of such beauty that he became regarded — albeit not during his lifetime — as one of the greatest of all the Romantic poets, alongside the likes of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. His odes rank among his most popular and studied works, none more so than “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the source of this famed insight. In five stanzas, Keats reflects upon the urn, and how it serves as a silent voice of the past — a literal vessel for time and memory. The meaning of the poem’s final two lines has had critics arguing among themselves since at least the 1950s: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Enigmatic, certainly, and at the same time, unquestionably beautiful.