Rachel Carson // "For most of us, knowledge of our world comes largely through sight, yet we look about with such unseeing eyes that we are partially blind. One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, 'What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?'"
Martin Luther King Jr. // "It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important... So while the law may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits of men. And when you change the habits of men, pretty soon the attitudes and the hearts will be changed. And so there is a need for strong legislation constantly to grapple with the problems we face."
Naguib Mahfouz // "Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease."
Agnes Varda // "I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That's what I try to do all the time."
Jeff Buckley // "I know there are so many new ideas that haven’t even occurred to me, and it’s going to take more time and maturity for me to channel them. I’ll just let it happen and try not to rush it too much."
Alejandro Jodorowsky // "The universe is changing, the universe is expanding. Everything is constantly changing. So when a human being remains unchanged, like a rock, clinging to what he or she is throughout an entire lifetime, it’s a tragedy. A human being has to be fluid, changing, expanding, developing, and at any given moment, has to ask, 'Why am I suffering? Why does this bother me? Why am I searching for something? Why do I hate such and such thing? Why can’t I forgive and why can’t I liberate myself from this?' All of my work is that, it’s the development of a character who slowly but surely expands, self-actualizes, and reaches a higher spiritual level. My characters obtain wisdom. To arrive at such wisdom is to arrive at the joy of living."
Bruce Lee // "If you follow the classical pattern, you are understanding the routine, the tradition...you are not understanding yourself."
Lightnin' Hopkins // "When he get up there and put his whole soul in there and you can feel it, it's just like a preacher. You go to church, a real preacher, real preachin'... He's honest to God, tryin' to get you to understand these things. Well, that's just the same as singin' the blues. It's the same thing."
James Baldwin // "You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you."
Jorge Luis Borges // "For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don't."
Virginia Woolf // "Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm... What rhythm is...goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it."
Willem de Kooning // "You know the real world...this so-called real world...is something you put up with. Like everybody else. I'm in my element when I am a little bit out of this world."