Jane Goodall // "I want to wander in the wild."
Gael Garcia Bernal // "It is the great adventure in life: circulating, finding each other, meeting by accident on the road."
David Hockney // "I draw flowers everyday on my iPhone and send them to my friends, so they get fresh flowers every morning."
Patti Smith // "I wasn't attractive, I wasn't very verbal, I wasn't very smart in school. I wasn't anything that showed the world I was something special, but I had this tremendous hope all the time. I had this tremendous spirit that kept me going... I was a happy child, because I had this feeling that I was going to go beyond my body physical...I just knew it."
Bill Murray // "People are like music, some speak the truth and others are just noise."
Yoko Ono // "Unclog your mind. Unclog your room. Arrange your room in a way you wish your mind would be."
Susan Sontag // "The vast majority of people, those who could not afford to have a portrait painted, had no record of what they looked like as children. Today, we all have photographs in which we can see ourselves at age six... We have similar information about our parents and grandparents... They make you realize that these people really were children once. To be able to see oneself and one's parents as children is an experience unique to our time. The camera has brought people a new...relation to themselves, to their physical appearance, to aging, to their own mortality."
Miles Davis // "It took me twenty years study and practice to work up to what I wanted to play in this performance."
Emma Gonzalez // "I have talked so much in the past few days that sometimes I feel like I might have used up all my words and I’ll never speak again... We are children who are being expected to act like adults, while the adults are proving themselves to behave like children."
William S. Burroughs // "The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible."
J.K. Rowling // "Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places. Of course... many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces...brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy... Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden. If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better."
James Baldwin // "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction."