Edith Piaf // "I always thought my days spent in darkness as a child gave me a very special sensitivity. Much later, when I really wanted to hear, really 'see' a song, I'd close my eyes. And when I wanted to bring it out of the very depths of myself, out of my guts, out of my belly, when the song had to come from far away, I'd close my eyes."
Sergei Parajanov // "We were searching for ourselves in each other."
Freddie Mercury // "We're seeking perfection, even if we know it's virtually impossible to find... We are meticulous. It drives some...mad, but we want everything to be as good as it can."
Zadie Smith // "I think of myself as somebody not at home, I suppose. Not at home anywhere, not at home ever...not comfortable in themselves in their supposed lives, in their nation, in their bodies, in everything. There are lots of people who feel very certain about themselves, where they're born, what it means. I never felt that way... I don't think of that as a negative feeling. To me, it's creative. It's the people who feel that they belong very strongly who put the fear of God into me, to be honest."
Leonard Cohen // "You live your life as if it’s real... The evidence accumulates that you’re not running the show. You still have to make choices as if you were running the show, but you make your choices with the intuitive understanding that it’s unfolding as it must... And if you can relax in that...if you can even touch it, or if it asserts itself from time to time, then the invincible defeat is transcended."
Edward Gorey // "All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important... You can describe all the externals of a performance...everything, in fact, but what really constitutes its core. Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is what's left over after you've explained everything else."
Sophia Loren // "Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. You must be able to sustain yourself against staggering blows... That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go so much further than people with vastly superior talent."
Albert Einstein // "A human being is a part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'... He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature... Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."
Doris Lessing // "Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly throughout his or her school life is something like this: You are in the process of being indoctrinated... What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture... You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors... Those of you who are more robust and individual...will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself, educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always...that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."
Ayrton Senna // "At the same moment you are doing something that nobody else is able to do...at the same moment that you are seen as the best, the fastest and somebody that cannot be touched, you are enormously fragile."
Amy Winehouse // "I’m a very romantic person. I don’t mean romantic in a flowers and chocolate kind of way. It’s more like if it’s raining, I’ll go up to the window and press my nose against the glass and sigh at how beautiful it all looks."
Aldous Huxley // "The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted."