Simone de Beauvoir // "I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way."
Leonard Cohen // "If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day."
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."
Hunter S. Thompson // "A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance... You have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else... But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living within that way of life. But you say, ‘I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.’ And there’s the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don’t know...is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by deciding to look, you go a long way toward making the choice."
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."
Charles Bukowski // "Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them."
Bill Murray // "The more relaxed you are, the better you are at everything: the better you are with your loved ones, the better you are with your enemies, the better you are at your job, the better you are with yourself."
Tennessee Williams // "We have one life, one shot at all the glorious things of life, and we walk about constricted, apologetic, afraid. We have so little time; we have so little space upon which to spread our love and our talents and our kindness. Run toward life fulsomely and freely."
Björk // "We go through changes roughly every three years, sometimes seven, where our colour palette changes and how we feel changes…the aroma or the textures…the lightness or darkness around us shifts."
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."