Jean-Paul Sartre // "We are all free, completely free. We can each do any damn thing we want. Which is more than most of us dare to imagine."
Rainer Maria Rilke // "Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words."
Pina Bausch // "Repetition is not repetition. The same action makes you feel something completely different by the end."
Simone de Beauvoir // "The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power."
Georgia O'Keeffe // "I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do."
Frida Kahlo // "Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away."
D.H. Lawrence // "Be a good animal, true to your instincts."
Kurt Vonnegut // "America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves... Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor."
Ernest Hemingway // "When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve."
David Lynch // "I don’t like going out anyway. I like to stay at home. Of course I do think it’s important sometimes to go out and see new things and feel the so-called reality. And that can conjure ideas. But I think human beings can sense the air and feel what’s going on in the world without going out."
Jack Kerouac // "I have the right ideas, but my words are too complicated. I need to simplify them, so that people won't get lost in the dark when they see and hear them. I want them to shine like beacons of light in a world of overly complicated darkness. One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
Toni Morrison // "I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls...he asks, 'How are you?' And instead of 'Oh, fine...and you?', I blurt out the truth: 'Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can’t seem to work, to write; it’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything...I’ve never felt this way before…' I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: 'No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work...not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job.' I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed... This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."