James Baldwin // "The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived...nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died...through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life."
Terence McKenna // "The hour is late; the clock is ticking; we will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball. We are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived lives and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world. Now the challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet-to-be-born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under…caring for, empowering, and building a future that honours the past, honours the planet and honours the power of the human imagination. There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet, as the human imagination. Let's not sell it straight. Let's not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies. Let's not give our control over to the least among us. Rather, you know, claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination."
Hunter S. Thompson // "Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives...and to the 'good life', whatever it is and wherever it happens to be."
Andre Breton // "Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions."
George Harrison // "I'll tell you one thing for sure: once you get to the point where you're actually doing things for truth's sake, then nobody can ever touch you again because you're harmonizing with a greater power."
Fyodor Dostoyevsky // "I seem to have such strength in me now, that I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, 'I exist'. In thousands of agonies…I exist. I'm tormented on the rack…but I exist! Though I sit alone on a pillar…I exist! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there."
Helen Frankenthaler // "I wanted things that I couldn't at times articulate."
Joan Mitchell // "I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me...and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves with me."
Abbas Kiarostami // "I've often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it's inside a frame."
Timothy Leary // "The fact of the matter is that all apparent forms of matter and body are momentary clusters of energy. We are little more than flickers on a multidimensional television screen. This realization directly experienced can be delightful. You suddenly wake up from the delusion of separate form and hook up to the cosmic dance."
Hayao Miyazaki // "We have a word for that in Japanese. It's called ma. Emptiness. It's there intentionally. (claps hands) The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness. But if you take a moment, then the tension building…can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension all the time you just get numb… What really matters is the underlying emotions…that you never let go of those."
Henry Miller // "To make living itself an art, that is the goal."