Aldous Huxley // "There are quiet places also in the mind, he said meditatively. But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately...to put a stop to the quietness. We don’t like the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head...round and round, continually... What's it for? What's it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost that it isn't there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night...not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep...the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits, all the fragments of it we've been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like the outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows...a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying... For one's alone in the crystal, and there's no support from the outside, there is nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or to stand on… There is nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiastic about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressibly lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressibly terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize you and engulf you, you'd die; all the regular, habitual daily part of you would die. There would be an end of bandstands and whizzing factories, and one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange, unheard of manner."
Richard Feynman // "Nature cannot be fooled."
John Lee Hooker // "I don't think about time. You're here when you're here. I think about today, staying in tune."
Jeff Buckley // "People usually like to travel around in packs, because they need reassurance, they constantly need to be justified by the acceptance of others and that’s such a moveable feast, you never know if you’re up or down and I really can’t trust that...and I’ve learned not to. It can give you the illusion that you are correct just because you are accepted. And really it may not be true."
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."
