Barack Obama (on his parents' meeting) // "She stopped and laughed to herself. 'Did I ever tell you that he was late for our first date? He asked me to meet him in front of the university library at one. When I got there he hadn’t arrived, but I figured I’d give him a few minutes. It was a nice day, so I laid out on one of the benches, and before I knew it I had fallen asleep. Well, an hour later — an hour! — he shows up with a couple of his friends. I woke up and the three of them were standing over me, and I heard your father saying, serious as can be, 'You see, gentlemen. I told you that she was a fine girl, and that she would wait for me.' ... My mother laughed once more, and once again I saw her as the child she had been. Except this time I saw something else: In her smiling, slightly puzzled face, I saw what all children must see at some point if they are to grow up — their parents’ lives revealed to them as separate and apart, reaching out beyond the point of their union or the birth of a child, lives unfurling back to grandparents, great-grandparents, an infinite number of chance meetings, misunderstandings, projected hopes, limited circumstances. My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people in her head, flattered by my father’s attention, confused and alone, trying to break out of the grip of her own parents’ lives. The innocence she carried that day, waiting for my father, had been tinged with misconceptions, her own needs. But it was a guileless need, one without self-consciousness, and perhaps that’s how any love begins, impulses and cloudy images that allow us to break across our solitude, and then, if we’re lucky, are finally transformed into something firmer."
Meryl Streep // "I'm curious about people... I'm interested in what it would be like to be you."
Andy Warhol // "When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can't make them change if they don't want to, just like when they do want to, you can't stop them."
Heath Ledger // "I felt like when I left home that I was on a journey, and I still am."
Alejandro Jodorowsky // "It's so weird to be alive and to be inside a body."
Marina Abramovic // “Our society is in a mess of losing its spiritual centre. The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind.”
Charlie Chaplin // "To those who can hear me, I say — do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed — the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish... You, the people, have the power... Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth the future and old age a security... Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness...let us all unite!"
John F. Kennedy // "Our problems are manmade...therefore, they can be solved by man. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable...and we believe they can do it again."
Diana Vreeland // "Give them what they never knew they wanted."
Winston Churchill // "We are still masters of our fate. We are still captains of our souls."
Thelonious Monk // "The only cats that are worth anything are the cats that take chances."
Leonard Bernstein // "The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another...and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world."
