Richard Brautigan // "I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end."
Jack Kerouac // "Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind."
Patti Smith // "I believe that we, this planet, hasn't seen its golden age. Everybody says it's finished...art's finished, rock and roll is dead...fuck that! This is my chance in the world. I didn't live back there in Mesopotamia. I wasn't there in the Garden of Eden. I wasn't there with Emperor Han. I'm here right now and I want now to be the golden age... If only every generation would realize that the time for greatness is right now when they're alive...the time to flower is now."
T.S. Eliot // "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."
Sergei Parajanov // "We were searching for ourselves in each other."
Susan Sontag // "I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces 'intelligence.'"
Bob Dylan // "It’s nice to be able to put yourself in an environment where you can completely accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from your inner workings of your mind. And block yourself off to where you can control it all, take it down… For me, the environment to write the song is extremely important. The environment has to bring something out in me that wants to be brought out. It’s a contemplative, reflective thing… Environment is very important. People need peaceful, invigorating environments. Stimulating environments."
Jack Kerouac // "In the general uproar of gifts and unwinding of wrappers it was always a delight for me to step out on the porch or even go out on the street a ways at one o’clock in the morning and listen to the silent hum of heaven diamond stars, watch the red and green windows of homes, consider the trees that seemed frozen in sudden devotion, and think over the events of another year passed."
Leonard Cohen // "May you be surrounded by friends and family, and if this is not your lot, may the blessings find you in your solitude."
Bill Murray // "I think if you can take care of yourself, and then maybe try to take care of someone else, that's sort of how you're supposed to live."
Joan Didion // "I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment."
Albert Einstein // "When we survey our lives...we soon observe that almost the whole of our actions and desires are bound up with the existence of other human beings... We eat food that others have grown, wear clothes that others have made, live in houses that others have built. The greater part of our knowledge and beliefs has been communicated to us by other people through...language which others have created. Without language our mental capacities would be poor indeed... The individual, if left alone from birth would remain primitive and beast-like in his thoughts and feelings to a degree that we can hardly conceive. The individual is what he is and has the significance that he has, not so much in virtue of his individuality, but rather as a member of a great human society."