Mary Oliver // "Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable... I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours... Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing... If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much."
Andrei Tarkovsky // "Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal... Modern art has taken the wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to affirm the value of the individual for his own sake. What purports to be art begins to looks like an eccentric occupation for suspect characters who maintain that any personalised action is of intrinsic value simply as a display of self-will. But in an artistic creation the personality does not assert itself it serves another, higher and communal idea. The artist is always the servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle. Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of the self can only be expressed in sacrifice. We are gradually forgetting about this, and at the same time, inevitably, losing all sense of human calling."
Anais Nin // "You live...sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book…or you take a trip…and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure... Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this...without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death."
Björk // "Let’s start again in a new world but also we’ll have solar-powered high-tech gear with us. A sci-fi camping trip."
Jeff Buckley // "I need space, stillness...and no telephones. If I write it takes a long time for a certain language to emerge. Because it’s sort of like quitting smoking when you first start writing...it takes a while for the nicotine to leave your system, until you’re totally pure. Then you start."
Toni Morrison // "Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do."
Alexander McQueen // "There comes a time in your life when you focus solely on what you believe is right, regardless of what everybody else is doing."
Ernest Hemingway // "We must try to grow up again and face what we have to face without being irritable or hurt that someone did not understand and appreciate."
Garry Winogrand // "You know why your pictures are no fucking good? Because they don’t describe the chaos of life."
Charles Mingus // "I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time."
Paul Bowles // "Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
Tove Jansson // "If I could wish something good for someone, I would wish for them an island with no address."
