NITCH

Photo of Yohji Yamamoto

Yohji Yamamoto // "I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion."

Photo of Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright // "The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life."

Photo of Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse // "Don’t try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out."

Photo of Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali // "There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction."

Photo of Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac // "I promise I shall never give up, and that I’ll die yelling and laughing, and that until then I’ll rush around this world I insist is holy and pull at everyone’s lapel and make them confess to me and to all."

Photo of Nick Cave

Nick Cave // "You are right to be worried about your growing feelings of cynicism and you need to take action to protect yourself and those around you… Cynicism is not a neutral position…and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils. I know this because much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line. I lacked the knowledge, the foresight, the self-awareness. I just didn’t know. It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, to understand that it was crying out for help. It took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope. Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like…keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so."

Photo of Carl Jung

Carl Jung // "I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy…even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears."

Photo of Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh // "I want something more concise, more simple, more serious; I want more soul and more love and more heart."

Photo of Tom Waits

Tom Waits // "The way you do anything is the way you do everything."

Photo of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf // "Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm... What rhythm is...goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it."

Photo of David Lynch

David Lynch // "Inside, we are ageless...and when we talk to ourselves, it’s the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little. It’s the body that is changing around that ageless center."

Photo of Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso // "Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working."

Photo of Henry Miller

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."

Photo of Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy // "Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

Photo of Anais Nin

Anais Nin // "We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."

Photo of Miles Davis

Miles Davis // "When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that makes it good or bad."

Photo of Bill Murray

Bill Murray // "The last time doesn’t exist. It’s only this time. And everything is going to be different this time. There’s only now."

Photo of Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn // "I believe, every day, you should have at least one exquisite moment."

Photo of Pina Bausch

Pina Bausch // "It is almost unimportant whether a work finds an understanding audience. One has to do it because one believes that it is the right thing to do. We are not only here to please."

Photo of William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs // "Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence...emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink."

Photo of Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini // "I had a profound desire to be alone, because only alone, lost, silent, on foot, can I recognize things."

Photo of Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou // "Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure...and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed."

Photo of Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky // "Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours."

Photo of Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac // "Everything is ecstasy, inside... Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-endings drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside...and you will remember."