Richard Avedon // "Images have replaced language...and reading. The responsibility to your role in history, in whatever is going to happen to human beings — you are the new writers. And we can no longer be sloppy about what we do with a camera. You have this weapon in your hands...and it is going to teach the world, it’s going to record the world, it is going to explain to the world and to the children that are coming...what this world was like. It is an incredible responsibility."
Jane Goodall // "I hope people take away the fact that it is possible to have a different sort of life."
George Harrison // "Just as cinematic images appear to be real but are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusion. The planetary spheres, with their countless forms of life, are naught but figures in a cosmic motion picture. One's values are profoundly changed when he is finally convinced that creation is only a vast motion picture and that not in, but beyond, lies his own ultimate reality."
Maya Angelou // "Find a beautiful piece of art...fall in love...admire it...and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less."
Diane Arbus // "I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself."
Peter Beard // "Life is just a flick of the fingers. Let's face it. And any little bit...you can expand it or enrich it, I think you want to push that and do it."
Jack Kerouac // "Everything is ecstasy, inside... Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-endings drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside...and you will remember."
Simone de Beauvoir // "It must be said...that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death."
Constantin Brancusi // "What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things...it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface."
Claude Monet // "What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence."
Charles Bukowski // "Either peace or happiness, let it enfold you. When I was a young man I felt these things were dumb, unsophisticated. I had bad blood, a twisted mind, a precarious upbringing. I was hard as granite, I leered at the sun. I trusted no man and especially no woman... I challenged everything, was continually being evicted, jailed, in and out of fights, in and out of my mind... Peace and happiness to me were signs of inferiority, tenants of the weak, an addled mind. But as I went on...it gradually began to occur to me that I wasn't different from the others, I was the same... Everybody was nudging, inching, cheating for some insignificant advantage, the lie was the weapon and the plot was empty... Cautiously, I allowed myself to feel good at times. I found moments of peace in cheap rooms just staring at the knobs of some dresser or listening to the rain in the dark. The less I needed the better I felt... I re-formulated. I don't know when, date, time, all that but the change occured. Something in me relaxed, smoothed out. I no longer had to prove that I was a man, I didn’t have to prove anything. I began to see things: coffee cups lined up behind a counter in a cafe. Or a dog walking along a sidewalk. Or the way the mouse on my dresser top stopped there with its body, its ears, its nose, it was fixed, a bit of life caught within itself and its eyes looked at me and they were beautiful. Then...it was gone. I began to feel good, I began to feel good in the worst situations and there were plenty of those... I welcomed shots of peace, tattered shards of happiness... And finally I discovered real feelings of others, unheralded, like lately, like this morning, as I was leaving for the track, I saw my wife in bed, just the shape of her head there...so still, I ached for her life, just being there under the covers. I kissed her in the forehead, got down the stairway, got outside, got into my marvelous car, fixed the seatbelt, backed out the drive. Feeling warm to the fingertips, down to my foot on the gas pedal, I entered the world once more, drove down the hill past the houses full and empty of people, I saw the mailman, honked, he waved back at me."
Bob Marley // "My life is only important if I can help plenty of people. If my life is just me and my own security, then I don’t want it."