James Baldwin // "For nothing is fixed...the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."
Anton Chekhov // "That’s it, I guess. Just go on living, whether you feel like it or not."
Albert Einstein // "When we survey our lives...we soon observe that almost the whole of our actions and desires are bound up with the existence of other human beings... We eat food that others have grown, wear clothes that others have made, live in houses that others have built. The greater part of our knowledge and beliefs has been communicated to us by other people through...language which others have created. Without language our mental capacities would be poor indeed... The individual, if left alone from birth would remain primitive and beast-like in his thoughts and feelings to a degree that we can hardly conceive. The individual is what he is and has the significance that he has, not so much in virtue of his individuality, but rather as a member of a great human society."
Audrey Hepburn // "We all want to be loved, don’t we?"
Willem Dafoe // "There's a real wisdom to not saying a thing."
Bob Dylan // "Boy, I hurried... I hurried for a long time. I'm sorry I did. All the time you're hurrying, you're not really as aware as you should be. You're trying to make things happen instead of just letting it happen. You follow me?"
Stanley Kubrick // "Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism... As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong, and lucky, he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth... Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death...our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."
Jean Cocteau // "Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like...then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping. What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you."
Hunter S. Thompson // "I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I felt that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between those two poles...a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other...that kept me going."