Jack Kerouac // "Rest and be kind, you don't have to prove anything."
Simone Weil // "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
Joan Didion // "I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest people. You are getting a woman who, somewhere along the line, misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract...in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor."
Henry Miller // "If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked."
John Cage // "I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones."
George Carlin // "Have you ever started a path? No one seems willing to do this. We don't mind using existing paths, but we rarely start new ones. Do it today. Start a path. Even if it doesn't lead anywhere."
Charles Bukowski // "We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."
Toni Morrison // "When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game."
Jim Carrey // "My father could have been a great comedian but he didn't believe that that was possible for him, and so he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe job as an accountant and when I was 12 years old he was let go from that safe job, and our family had to do whatever we could to survive. I learned many great lessons from my father. Not the least of which was that: You can fail at what you don't want. So you might as well take a chance on doing what you love."
Nina Simone // "What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did."
James Baldwin // "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It...taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive... An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive."
Joni Mitchell // "This is what I think about people: They want, they want and they want. However, if I actually gave them what they wanted, then they'd just get sick of it... People get sick of your name. People get sick of your face. It doesn't matter what you do. Recognizing those times, I would go even further out. I figured they're going to get me anyway, so I may as well stretch out."