David Foster Wallace // "The world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom... But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth..."
Marina Abramovic // "You don’t question breathing. You have to breathe otherwise you’ll just die, so you breathe."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry // "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
John Fowles // "Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationships between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all, our relationship to nothingness. To death."
Juliette Binoche // "The only way for me to stay young is to let go of youth...youth is within yourself. How do you renew yourself, how do you go to a new layer of yourself? That is the real youth...the renewance of yourself."
Yayoi Kusama // "In this universe, the moon, the sun, each and every star, my own life, your life, they are all a single polka dot among billions."
Audrey Hepburn // "I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it."
Jean Cocteau // "There is no such thing as love; only proof of love."
Arundhati Roy // "Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness...and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling...their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
Chuck Palahniuk // "The unreal is more powerful than the real...it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create."
George Orwell // "In a time of universal deceit...telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
Audrey Hepburn // "People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed. Never throw out anyone."
