David Foster Wallace // "The world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom... But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the 'rat race'...the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth."
Bob Dylan (& Joan Baez) // "And it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns...that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn't have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale...that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself."
Jorge Luis Borges // "I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited."
Anais Nin // "I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits."
Wynton Marsalis // "You can reach a situation where things of intelligence and refinement and culture can be considered elite, and things that are crass and ignorant can be considered to be real and of the people; when you begin to have the mass of the populace believing that they should strive for something that’s not worth striving for, then tremendous amounts of energy goes into...the maintenance of that which is worthless."
Haruki Murakami // "What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get in the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things."
Charles Bukowski // "There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock. People so tired, mutilated...either by love or no love. People are just not good to each other. The rich are not good to the rich. The poor are not good to the poor. We are afraid. Our educational system tells us that we can all be big-ass winners. It hasn’t told us about the gutters or the suicides. Or the terror of one person aching in one place, alone. Untouched, unspoken to, watering a plant. People are not good to each other. People are not good to each other. People are not good to each other. I suppose they never will be. I don’t ask them to be. But sometimes I think about it...Too much, too little...More haters than lovers. People are not good to each other. Perhaps if they were our deaths would not be so sad... There must be a way. Surely there must be a way that we have not yet thought of."
Agnes Varda // "If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes."
Jean-Michel Basquiat // "I don’t know how to describe my work, because it's not always the same thing. It's like asking somebody...asking Miles Davis, 'How does your horn sound?' I don't think he could really tell you why he played, you know, why he plays this at this point in the music. You know, you're just, you're sort of on automatic...most of the time."
Philippe Petit // "You must not fall. When you lose your balance...you must not force yourself to stay steady. You must move forward."
Maya Angelou // "The white men and women could look at you with such loathing that you really wish...that you could dry up, in the moment, just shrivel up like that. And instead of that I’d put my head up and walk through, grit my teeth, survive it. But my god, what scars does that leave on somebody? I don’t even dare examine it myself. And when I reach for the pen...to write, I have to scrape it across those scars, to sharpen that point. And yet, I still have never, yet, really gone down to look at those scars. I just think I might dissolve."
Toni Morrison // "And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth."
