Pablo Picasso // "It takes a long time to become young."
Jack Kerouac // "Pain or love or danger makes you real again."
Chantal Akerman // "I never thought of myself as an odd one or different in any way…I just had a way, a way that was mine and mine alone. A way that was maybe a bit peculiar, but I liked that. I liked the fact that other people weren’t odd in the same way… I felt that being odd suited me… My oddness had a certain something, I thought. A style. A style that belonged to me. Then it became a habit and I no longer thought about my odd style, that was how I was and that was that."
Tennessee Williams // "I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will not last very long, which is all the more reason to enjoy it now."
W. H. Auden // "We are lived by powers we pretend to understand."
Anais Nin // "We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."
Anton Chekhov // "Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be."
Jorge Luis Borges // "For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don't."
Charles Bukowski // "I get many phonecalls now. They are all alike. 'Are you Charles Bukowski, the writer?' 'Yes,' I tell them. And they tell me that they understand my writing, and some of them are writers or want to be writers and they have dull and horrible jobs and they can't face the room, the apartment, the walls that night...they want somebody to talk to, and they can't believe that I can't help them, that I don't know the words. They can't believe that often now I double up in my room, grab my gut and say 'Jesus Jesus Jesus, not again!' They can't believe that the loveless people, the streets, the loneliness, the walls are mine too. And when I hang up the phone they think I have held back my secret. I don't write out of knowledge. When the phone rings, I too would like to hear words that might ease some of this. That's why my number's listed."
Thelonious Monk // "The loudest noise in the world is silence."
René Daumal // "You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know."
Henry Miller // "The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware…joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem."