Mahmoud Khalil // "These are my first words to you… During your first moments, I buried my face in my arms and kept my voice low so that the 70 other men sleeping in this concrete room would not see my cloudy eyes or hear my voice catch... Since that morning, I have come to recognize the look in the eyes of every father in this detention center. How is it that the same politicians who preach 'family values' are the ones tearing families apart? My heart aches that I could not hold you in my arms and hear your first cry…but my absence is not unique… In Palestine, this pain is part of daily life. Babies are born every day without their fathers…not because their fathers chose to leave, but because they are taken by war, by bombs, by prison cells and by the cold machinery of occupation. The grief your mother and I feel is but one drop in a sea of sorrow that Palestinian families have drowned in for generations… It was not a gap in the law that made me a political prisoner in Louisiana. It was my firm belief that our people deserve to be free, that their lives are worth more than the televised massacre we are witnessing…and that the displacement that began in 1948 and culminated in the current genocide must finally end… As a Palestinian refugee, I inherited a kind of exile that followed me to every border, every airport, every form... Each crossing required me to prove my docility, my identity and my very right to exist... You may never feel that weight. You may never have to translate your humanity through paperwork… I hope, with all my heart, that you will not witness the oppression that I have known… Loving you is not separate from the struggle for liberation. It is liberation itself. I fight for you, and for every Palestinian child whose life deserves safety, tenderness and freedom. I hope one day you will stand tall knowing your father was not absent out of apathy, but out of conviction. And I will spend my life making up for the moments we lost…starting with this one, writing to you with all the love in my heart."
David Lynch // "Just slow things down and it becomes more beautiful."
James Baldwin // "If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe. The forces thus released in the people can never be held in check, but run their devouring course, destroying the very foundations which it was imagined they would save… We are unbelievably ignorant concerning what goes on in our country…to say nothing of what goes on in the rest of the world…and appear to have become too timid to question what we are told. Our failure to trust one another deeply enough to be able to talk to one another has become so great that people with these questions in their hearts do not speak them; our opulence is so pervasive that people who are afraid to lose whatever they think they have persuade themselves of the truth of a lie, and help disseminate it; and God help the innocent here, that man or woman who simply wants to love, and be loved. Unless this would-be lover is able to replace his or her backbone with a steel rod, he or she is doomed... Wherever love is found, it unfailingly makes itself felt in the individual, the personal authority of the individual. Judged by this standard, we are a loveless nation. The best that can be said is that some of us are struggling. And what we are struggling against is that death in the heart which leads not only to the shedding of blood, but which reduces human beings to corpses while they live."
Sophia Loren // "When I’m walking along in the street, I always feel that around the corner, there is something wonderful waiting for me. That’s my attitude."
Hayao Miyazaki // "When you die, you can’t see sunsets."
Ernest Hemingway // "The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed."
Björk // "The more digital we have, the more naked skin and rawness we will want."
Jack Kerouac // "Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running...that’s the way to live."
John Burroughs // "To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter...to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring…these are some of the rewards of the simple life."
Franz Kafka // "I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep…and say: ‘Come with me...we are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.’ Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much."
David Lynch // "I’m just, you know, kind of happy in the doing of things. Even just having a great cup of coffee is happiness. Getting an idea, or realizing an idea. Working on a painting…working on a piece of sculpture, working on a film. One thing I noticed is that many of us, we do what we call work for a goal. For a result. And in the doing, it’s not that much happiness. And yet that’s our life going by. If you’re transcending every day, building up that happiness, it eventually comes to: it doesn’t matter what your work is. You just get happy in the work. You get happy in the little things and the big things. And if the result isn’t what you dreamed of, it doesn’t kill you, if you enjoyed the doing of it. It’s important that we enjoy the doing of our life."
Drew Barrymore // "Every morning I stay in bed for ten minutes to ponder my place in the universe; then I wash my face."
