Jonas Mekas // "I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains. The books I read, their plots, their protagonists fade... Names of people, books, cities. They are already fading away. Even the titles of films I’ve seen recently...they have already faded... Everything that I see, or read, or listen to, connects, translates into moods, bits of surroundings, colors... With me, everything is mood, mood, or else...simply nothingness."
Stevie Nicks // "There were times when I was between twenty and twenty-seven...that my dad would say, 'How long are you going to do this? You have no money, you're not happy, you work constantly, you work at restaurants, you clean houses, you get sick very easily...you don't have any friends, why are you doing this?' And I would just say, 'Because it's just what I came here to do.'"
Buckminster Fuller // "I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe."
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."
Albert Camus // "The light overwhelmed me. It was authentic, a real light, an afternoon light, signifying life, the sort of light that makes one aware of living."
Leonard Cohen // "The older you get...the deeper the love you need."
Maya Angelou // "Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure...and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed."
Patti Smith // "That's what artists do, that's what poets do...we all do it. We start with something, and sometimes we destroy everything that we've made in order to get to the core place where we started from."
Martha Graham // "To me, the only sin is mediocrity."
Agnes Martin // "When a beautiful rose dies, beauty does not die because it is not really in the rose. Beauty is an awareness in the mind."
John Steinbeck // "It is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus...a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time."
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."