Martha Graham // "There is...only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist... The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open."
Albert Camus // "Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love."
Sam Shepard // "Look it, you start out...and you’re full of defenses. You have all of this stuff to prove. You have all of these shields in front of you. All your weapons are out. It’s like you’re going into battle. You can accomplish a certain amount that way. But then you get to a point where you say, 'But there's this whole other territory I'm leaving out.' And you begin to see that you leave out so much when you go to battle with the shield... You can’t grow that way... There just comes a point when you have to...risk becoming more open to the vulnerable side, which I think is the female side. It’s much more courageous than the male side."
Haruki Murakami // "What's nurtured slowly grows well."
Anais Nin // "I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me...the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself...That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art."
Ai Weiwei // "Maybe to be powerful is to be fragile."
Barack Obama // "Hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it. Hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be."
Carl Jung // "A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual... If, therefore, I have a so-called collective experience as a member of a group, it takes place on a lower level of consciousness than if I had the experience by myself alone...because the presence of so many people together exerts great suggestive force... It is only necessary for something to happen, for instance a proposal backed by the whole crowd, and we too are all for it, even if the proposal is immoral. In the crowd one feels no responsibility, but also no fear. Thus identification with the group is a simple and easy path to follow."
Leo Tolstoy // "Stop a moment, cease your work, look around you."
Kurt Cobain // "No one is afraid of heights, they’re afraid of falling down. No one is afraid of saying I love you, they’re afraid of the answer."
Tracey Emin // "The soul will always do what it needs to do."
James Baldwin // "Most people live in almost total darkness…people, millions of people whom you will never see, who don’t know you, never will know you, people who may try to kill you in the morning, live in a darkness which...if you have that funny terrible thing which every artist can recognize and no artist can define...you are responsible to those people to lighten, and it does not matter what happens to you. You are being used in the way a crab is useful, the way sand certainly has some function. It is impersonal. This force which you didn’t ask for, and this destiny which you must accept, is also your responsibility. And if you survive it, if you don’t cheat, if you don’t lie, it is not only, you know, your glory, your achievement, it is almost our only hope... Because only an artist can tell, and only artists have told since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad... The trouble is that although the artist can do it, the price that he has to pay himself and that you, the audience, must also pay, is a willingness to give up everything, to realize that although you spent twenty-seven years acquiring this house, this furniture, this position, although you spent forty years raising this child, these children, nothing, none of it belongs to you. You can only have it by letting it go. You can only take if you are prepared to give... It is a total risk of everything, of you and who you think you are, who you think you’d like to be, where you think you’d like to go...everything, and this forever, forever."