Toni Morrison // "Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be."
Isaac Asimov // "As computers take over more and more of the work that human beings shouldn’t be doing in the first place…because it doesn’t utilize their brains, it stifles and bores them to death…there’s going to be nothing left for human beings to do but the more creative types of endeavor. The only way we can indulge in the more creative types of endeavor is to have brains that aim at that from the start. You can’t take a human being and put him to work at a job that underuses the brain and keep him working at it for decades and decades, and then say, 'Well, that job isn’t there, go do something more creative.' You have beaten the creativity out of him. But if from the start children are educated into appreciating their own creativity, then probably almost all of us can be creative. In the olden days, very few people could read and write. Literacy was a very novel sort of thing, and it was felt that most people just didn’t have it in them. But with mass education, it turned out that most people could be taught to read and write."
Bob Dylan // "An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he's at somewhere. You always have to realize that you're constantly in a state of becoming. And, as long as you can stay in that realm you'll sort of be alright."
Frida Kahlo // "I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of 'madness.' Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long, I’d paint; pain, love, and tenderness, I would laugh as much as I feel like…they would all say: 'Poor thing, she’s crazy!' …I would build my own world, which while I lived, would be in agreement with all the worlds… My madness would not be an escape from 'reality.'"
Boris Pasternak // "Well, what are you?… What are you conscious of in yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels? No. However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity…in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people. And now listen carefully. You in others…this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life…your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you…the you that enters the future and becomes part of it."
René Char // "To suffer from the ache of intuition."
Paul Auster // "People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle."
Oscar Wilde // "A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want."
Carl Jung // "I always worked with the conviction that…there are no insoluble problems, and experience has so far justified me…I have often seen individuals who simply outgrew a problem which had destroyed others. This 'outgrowing'…revealed itself on further experience to be the raising of the level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of his view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically on its own terms, but faded out in contrast to a new and stronger life-tendency. It was not repressed and made unconscious, but merely appeared in a different light, and so became different itself. What, on a lower level, had led to the wildest conflicts and to emotions full of panic, viewed from the higher level of the personality, now seemed like a storm in the valley seen from a high mountain top. This does not mean that the thunderstorm is robbed of its reality; it means that, instead of being in it, one is now above it."
Maya Angelou // "Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial costs, anybody can have that, I mean in truth."
Hayao Miyazaki // "I'd like more of the world to go back to being wild."
John Coltrane // "There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we've discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror."