Bjork // "I realized I could have an easy life...just have a glass of Cognac and good books and two jobs and do my songs in the evening, but I would be such a consumer, taking it all in and not giving anything back. I thought: Ok...if I don’t go on a mission now and make some sacrifices, as these people did, I will never forgive myself."
Jack Kerouac // "Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running...that's the way to live."
Slavoj Zizek // "I despise the kind of book which tells you how to live, how to make yourself happy. Philosophers have no good news for you at this level. I believe the first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep shit you are in."
Helena Bonham Carter // "I think everything in life is art. What you do. How you dress. The way you love someone, and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in, and all your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home. Or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel. Life is art."
George Harrison // "I just have a belief that this is only one little bit...the physical world is one little bit of the universe."
Jim Harrison // "I remember my grandfather telling me how each of us must live with a full measure of loneliness that is inescapable, and we must not destroy ourselves with our passion to escape the aloneness."
Sylvia Plath // "There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds."
James Baldwin // "A man is not a man until he is able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from others."
Jeff Buckley // "Life has its own rhythm and you cannot impose your own structure upon it, you have to listen to what it tells you... It’s not earth that you move with a tractor...life is not like that. Life is more like earth that you learn about and plant seeds in… It’s something you have to have a relationship with in order to experience...you can’t mold it, you can’t control it."
Anne Frank // "How noble and good everyone could be if, every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the whole day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day."
David Bowie // "I wanted to express...a wish to destroy everything that we have ever created. When Nietzsche said 'God is dead,' it was a culmination of all the thoughts of the previous century...people were so aggrandized with their sense of science and the aftermath of the enlightenment and how man himself could improve the world. Then of course, it led to things like...Einstein’s discovery that time and space aren’t what we thought they were, and Freud in understanding another kind of human inside the human. All of these things culminated in the idea that everything we’ve known before was wrong. Everything. So we start the 20th century with this clean slate. We are now the Gods. And the greatest thing that we could do as God during that century was create the bomb. That was what we were good at doing. And I think that in itself...the repercussions of what we had done by standing in for this idea of morality, creating it all ourselves, so destroyed our fix on what we should be doing in life that we’re still living through that chaos right now. We have no spiritual lives to speak of...there is no direct sense of what our purpose is anymore. Now that may be a good thing because it may show itself to be that we, in fact, don’t have a purpose. Are we big enough or mature enough to exist like that? Are we mature enough to accept that there is no 'plan,' there is no 'going somewhere,' there is no gift of immortality at the end of this if we evolve... Maybe we have to exist and live on the idea that we have one day at a time to live...and can we do that? Because if we could do that, we may be serving some, really, some great thing."
Daniel Day-Lewis // "Shoes are strange things. If you take your shoes off in a situation in which you're vulnerable, you'll feel 10 times more vulnerable."