Abbas Kiarostami // "I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it’s inside a frame."
Mahmoud Darwish // "What have you done to us and what have you done to yourself?"
Leonard Cohen // "Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."
James Baldwin // "There may not be as much humanity in the world as one would like to see. But there is some. There’s more than one would think… If you break faith with what you know, that’s a betrayal of many, many, many, many people. I may know six people, but that’s enough. Love has never been a popular movement… The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of very few people."
Walt Whitman // "Happiness…not in another place but this place, not for another hour but this hour."
Agnes Varda // "If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes."
Martha Graham // "There is a vitality, a life force, an energy...that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist... The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open."
Albert Einstein // "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them."
Patti Smith // "That’s what artists do, that’s what poets do...we all do it. We start with something, and sometimes we destroy everything that we’ve made in order to get to the core place where we started from."
Jean-Luc Godard // "He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch."
Jiddu Krishnamurti // "You cannot reconcile creativeness with technical achievement. You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative; you may play the piano most brilliantly, and not be a musician. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter… We have technique…how to put up a house, how to build a bridge…how to educate our children through a system…we have learned all these techniques, but our hearts and minds are empty... Creativeness is not found through technique. If you have something to say, you create your own style; but when you have nothing to say, even if you have a beautiful style, what you write is only the traditional routine, a repetition in new words of the same old thing… So, having lost the song, we pursue the singer. We learn from the singer the technique of song, but there is no song; and I say the song is essential, the joy of singing is essential. When the joy is there, the technique can be built up from nothing; you will invent your own technique, you won’t have to study elocution or style. When you have, you see, and the very seeing of beauty is an art."
Bob Dylan // "I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else."