NITCH

Photo of Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre // "We are all free, completely free. We can each do any damn thing we want. Which is more than most of us dare to imagine."

Photo of Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami // "Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard."

Photo of Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan // "I had broken myself of the habit of thinking in short song cycles and began reading longer and longer poems to see if I could remember anything I read about in the beginning. I trained my mind to do this, had cast off gloomy habits and learned to settle myself down... I began cramming my brain with all kinds of deep poems. It seemed like I'd been pulling an empty wagon for a long time and now I was beginning to fill it up and would have to pull harder. I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture. I was changing in other ways, too. Things that used to affect me, didn't affect me anymore. I wasn’t too concerned about people, their motives. I didn’t feel the need to examine every stranger that approached."

Photo of Nina Simone

Nina Simone // "I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear."

Photo of Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg // "To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard."

Photo of Ethan Hawke

Ethan Hawke // "Well…most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about poetry. Right? They have a life to live, and they're not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg's poems or anybody's poems, until their father dies, they go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don't love you anymore, and all of a sudden, you're desperate for making sense out of this life… 'Has anybody ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?' Or the inverse…something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes. You love them so much, you can't even see straight. You know, you're dizzy. 'Did anybody feel like this before? What is happening to me?' And that's when art's not a luxury, it's actually sustenance. We need it."

Photo of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez // "I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature."

Photo of Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy // "Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave."

Photo of Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse // "This day will never come again and anyone who fails to eat and drink and taste and smell it will never have it offered to him again in all eternity. The sun will never shine as it does today...You must play your part and sing a song, one of your best."

Photo of Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein // "A human being is a part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'... He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature... Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."

Photo of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde // "The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist."

Photo of Anais Nin

Anais Nin // "I have a kind of courage you do not understand. I am far from blind, far from indifferent, but I will not indulge in impotent, passive despair. I will not add to the despair of the world. I am working on counterpoisins… I create a space in which people can breathe, restore their faith and strength to live."