Joan Didion // "See enough and write it down, I tell myself. And then some morning, when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I’m going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do… On that bankrupt morning, I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest. Paid passage back to the world out there. It all comes back. Remember what it is to be me."
Simone Weil // "This world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication… Every separation is a link."
Auguste Rodin // "The more simple we are, the more complete we become."
Stephen Fry // "Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it…that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing…an actor, a writer…I am a person who does things…I write, I act…and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun."
Philippe Petit // "I found out that total creativity involves a certain intellectual rebellion...not to become a criminal, but...you have to do things that are a little bit forbidden. You have to feel free."
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."
Eva Hesse // "My interest is in finding my own way."
Cormac McCarthy // "Some of the difficulty with quantum mechanics has to reside in the problem of coming to terms with the simple fact that there is no such thing as information in and of itself independent of the apparatus necessary to its perception. There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence. And yet it moved."
Jack Kerouac // "There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go."
James Baldwin // "Has everyone been in love? Not on the basis of the evidence. If they have, they’ve forgotten it. If everyone had been in love they’d treat their children differently. They’d treat each other differently."
Arundhati Roy // "The system will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling…their ideas, their version of history, their wars…their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We may be many and they be few... Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
Miles Davis // "Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself."