Thelonious Monk // "When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean."
Janis Joplin // "There isn't going to be a turning point...There isn't going to be any next-month-it'll-be-better, next fucking year, next fucking life. You don't have any time to wait for. You just got to look around you and say: So this is it. This is really all there is to it... Everybody just needing such little things and they can't get them. Everybody needing just a little...confidence from somebody else... Everybody, you know, like reaching out tentatively but drawing back...it seems like such a shame. It's so close to being, like, really right and good and open."
Charles Bukowski // "I spent weeks, months, years mulling about, passing my life away in tiny rooms and I was content with that... What a delicious thing it was to stretch out on a lumpy mattress in the dark on some second floor over an avenue, watching the headlights of cars work patterns across the ceiling... Rolling cigarettes in the dark, watching the red ash glow so red, it was magic even when a bit of ash would fall on your chest and burn you...shit!...you’d leap up laughing, then settle back down, wanting nothing, having nothing... I think I fattened my god damned soul in these rooms. All those hours of years...I suppose I was hiding, not wanting to be them, not wanting to be what my father had become...It looked like shit, it looked like waste... I hid, I hid, I hid, like a gopher, a mole, all I had was myself to feed upon and it filled me. I only became emptied when at times I had to enter the marketplace to sustain myself and I couldn’t believe those lives: men as slaves, doing monotonous and repetitive work they would never escape except by being discharged or dying but they accepted the horrible hours in order to make payment upon major necessities and minor luxuries. I preferred suicide, attempted several, failed, went back to the small rooms. And in those rooms, I blossomed again, like a flower, more like a flower on a cactus, but Christ it was marvelous, an out, a waiting, a calm place...I understood men who sat on mountain tops, who lived in caves. I understood that to have nothing was to have everything. The most valuable thing on earth was to have each hour as your own, that was all there was... To go up, fumble for your key, find it, fit it to the door, and the door opens and there is the dresser and there is the bed and there is the chair and there is the window and the dripping sink and there is the mouse sitting on the dresser, he has gotten bold, your eyes meet and his are much more beautiful than yours, and then with a lightning dart, he is gone and you are a young man in a very old world and you know it and it is absolutely strange and you sit down on the bed and take off your shoes and everything everywhere is quiet, final and perfect."
John Lewis // "Study the path of others to make your way easier and more abundant. Lean toward the whispers of your own heart, discover the universal truth, and follow its dictates... Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Release all bitterness. Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won. Choose confrontation wisely, but when it is your time don't be afraid to stand up, speak up, and speak out against injustice. And if you follow your truth down the road to peace and the affirmation of love, if you shine like a beacon for all to see, then the poetry of all the great dreamers and philosophers is yours to manifest in a nation, a world community, and a beloved community that is finally at peace with itself."
Albert Camus // "Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty."
Gil Scott-Heron // "I consider myself neither a poet, composer or musician. These are merely tools used by sensitive men to carve out a piece of beauty or truth that they hope may lead to peace and salvation."
Leonora Carrington // "I am never lonely...or rather I never suffer from loneliness. I suffer much from the idea that my loneliness might be taken away from me by a lot of mercilessly well-meaning people."
Hayao Miyazaki // "I believe that children's souls are the inheritors of historical memory from previous generations. It's just that as they grow older and experience the everyday world that memory sinks lower and lower. I feel I need to make a film that reaches down to that level. If I could do that I would die happy."
Saul Leiter // "There are the things that are out in the open and then there are the things that are hidden, and life...the real world has more to do with what is hidden, maybe. You think?"
James Baldwin // "No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time."
Leonard Cohen // "May you be surrounded by friends and family, and if this is not your lot, may the blessings find you in your solitude."
Billie Holiday // "You can't copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling."