Anthony Bourdain // "When you start thinking about what people like, you start thinking about what people expect. Then you start pandering to people’s expectations. Then you start talking about yourself in the third person. I learned very early on not to think about that. You go out there and do the best you can, and you do things that are interesting to you. Hopefully it will be interesting to other people. I don’t want to be adequate. I’d rather fail gloriously making something strange, awesome but ultimately a failure."
Frida Kahlo // "At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can."
Noam Chomsky // "Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours."
Charles Bukowski // "I was laying in bed one night and I thought, 'I’ll just quit. To hell with it.' And another little voice inside me said 'Don’t quit. Save that tiny little ember of spark. And never give them that spark because as long as you have that spark, you can start the greatest fire again.'"
Albert Camus // "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
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."
Henry Miller // "If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked."
Agnes Varda // "If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes."
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."
