Walt Whitman // "I swear to you, there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell."
Tilda Swinton // "I am a great friend of chaos. It’s all we have. I mean, this whole concept of being able to manage life...life is risk, life is chance, life is being open to chance. The best things in my life, and probably in anybody’s life, come out of being open to being blown off course."
Jeff Buckley // "I have no advice for anybody; except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time, and how that is beautiful, and has poetry inside. Even places you hate."
Karl Ove Knausgaard // "What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until...a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?"
John Lennon // "The more real you get, the more unreal the world gets."
Zadie Smith // "Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts."
Maya Angelou // "There were people who went to sleep last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. And those dead folks would give anything at all for just five minutes of this... So you watch yourself about complaining. What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it."
Frank Lloyd Wright // "We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means."
F. Scott Fitzgerald // "I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight."
Andy Warhol // "Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, 'So what.' 'My mother didn't love me.' So what... 'I'm a success but I'm still alone.' So what. I don't know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget."
Tom Waits (reading Charles Bukowski) // "Your life is your life. Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. Be on the watch. There are ways out. There is light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness. Be on the watch. The gods will offer you chances. Know them. Take them. You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. And the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. Your life is your life. Know it while you have it. You are marvelous. The gods wait to delight in you."
JK Rowling // "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."