Toni Morrison // "It’s not possible to constantly hone in on the crisis. You have to have the love and you have to have the magic, that’s also life."
Elliott Erwitt // "The work I care about is terribly simple."
John Coltrane // "I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I'm doing...the emotional reaction is all that matters, as long as there's some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it be understood."
Virginia Woolf // "I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields round me; and my legs pounding along roads; and sleep…animal existence."
Auguste Rodin // "Patience is also a form of action."
David Bowie // "Never work for other people at what you do. Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way, you would understand more about yourself or how you coexist with the rest of society. I think it's terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people's expectations."
Claude Monet // "What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence."
Susan Sontag // "I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces 'intelligence.'"
Bob Dylan // "And it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns...that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn't have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale...that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself."
Zadie Smith // I think the hardest thing for anyone is accepting that other people are real as you are. That’s it. Not using them as tools, not using them as examples or things to make yourself feel better or things to get over or under. Just accepting that they are absolutely as real as you are."
Aldous Huxley // "There are quiet places…in the mind, he said meditatively. But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately...to put a stop to the quietness. We don’t like the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head...round and round, continually... What's it for? What's it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost that it isn't there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night...not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep...the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits, all the fragments of it we've been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like the outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows...a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying... For one's alone in the crystal, and there's no support from the outside, there is nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or to stand on… There is nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiastic about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressibly lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressibly terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize you and engulf you, you'd die; all the regular, habitual daily part of you would die. There would be an end of bandstands and whizzing factories, and one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange, unheard of manner."
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 counterpoisons… I create a space in which people can breathe, restore their faith and strength to live."