Robert Frank // "When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice."
Marcel Marceau // "I don't want our youth to become anti-romantic. We have to make room for the soul."
Colin Wilson // "Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it."
Carrie Mae Weems // "I don’t always know what I’m doing. I’m often lost and struggling through a process and a set of ideas and emotions that I don’t always understand. Sometimes it takes me years to really understand what I’ve done… That’s why I think it’s so important to really sort of get out of the way of the work… I simply know that I need to make something…I need to realize something, grapple with something, and I do that…allowing the work to be what it is…allowing the meaning to emerge as it emerges. And maybe five years from now I’ll see something in the work that I really didn’t know that I was after."
Henry Miller // "What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin...to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it."
Leonard Cohen // "The older you get...the deeper the love you need."
Joan Didion // "We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give...we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us... To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves...there lies the great singular power of self-respect."
Jacques Brel // "I wish you endless dreams and the furious desire to realize some of them. I wish you to love what must be loved, and to forget what must be forgotten. I wish you passions. I wish you silences. I wish you birdsongs as you wake up and children’s laughter. I wish you to respect the differences of others, because the worth and virtues of each person often remain to be discovered. I wish you to resist the stagnation, the indifference, and the negative values of our time. I wish you at last to never to give up the search, for adventure, life, love. For life is a wonderful adventure and no reasonable person should give it up without a tough fight. I wish you above all to be yourself, proud of being and happy, for happiness is our true destiny."
Sylvia Plath // "What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world. It is that synthesizing spirit, that 'shaping' force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire... We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward."
James Baldwin // "No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time."
David Hockney // "I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money. I’m greedy for an exciting life."
Leonard Cohen // "May you be surrounded by friends and family, and if this is not your lot, may the blessings find you in your solitude."