Hermann Hesse // "Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap... Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard..."
Al Pacino // "The camera can film my face but until it captures my soul, you don't have a movie."
Gerhard Richter // "Of course I constantly despair at my own incapacity, at the impossibility of ever accomplishing anything... But then I always have the hope that, if I persevere, it might one day happen. And this hope is nurtured every time something appears...a scattered, partial, initial hint of something which reminds me of what I long for..."
Maurice Maeterlinck // "As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered."
Ernest Hemingway // "I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen."
Nina Simone // "I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I’m doing and why."
Wendell Berry // "It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey."
Fyodor Dostoyevsky // "Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him."
Iris Apfel // "I’m a hopeless romantic. I buy things because I fall in love with them. I never buy anything just because it’s valuable. My husband used to say I look at a piece of fabric and listen to the threads. It tells me a story. It sings me a song. I have to get a physical reaction when I buy something...a bolt of lightning."
Faiz Ahmad Faiz // "Look...the mouths of the locks are beginning to open, the links of the chains are coming undone...truth is still alive."
Billy Wilder // "Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You've got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven's "Pastoral." A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio."
Albert Camus // "That's why I like you so much. Your heart isn't dead."
