Leonard Cohen // "Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."
John Muir // "The body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one's flesh like radiant heat."
Björk // "I looked around me and thought about all the things that give me the greatest joy in life. It might be incredibly good wine that’s just perfect or the right music where you can tell that the artist has gone all the way, done anything to create a perfect song. I had to have a go at least once before I die and see if I could do the same thing."
David Hockney // "I draw flowers everyday on my iPhone and send them to my friends, so they get fresh flowers every morning."
Bruce Lee // "If you follow the classical pattern, you are understanding the routine, the tradition...you are not understanding yourself."
Bob Dylan // "I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library...everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right."
Brian Eno // "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit...all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure...the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them."
Fiona Apple // "You can hear our sad brains screaming: Give us something familiar, something similar to what we know already, that will keep us steady. Steady, steady going nowhere."
Angela Davis // "You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time."
Miles Davis // "When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that makes it good or bad."
Charles Bukowski // "Your life is your life. Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. Be on the watch. There are ways out. There is light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness. Be on the watch. The gods will offer you chances. Know them. Take them. You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. And the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. Your life is your life. Know it while you have it. You are marvelous. The gods wait to delight in you."
Joan Didion // "People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved... I think about people I know who have lost a husband, or wife, or child. I think particularly about how these people looked when I saw them unexpectedly...on the street, say, or entering a room...during the year or so after the death. What struck me in each instance was how exposed they seemed, how raw."