Jorge Luis Borges // "I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited."
Kurt Vonnegut // "My Uncle…taught me something very important. He said that when things are going really well we should be sure to notice it. He was talking about very simple occasions, not great victories. Maybe drinking lemonade under a shade tree, or smelling the aroma of a bakery, or fishing, or listening to music coming from a concert hall while standing in the dark outside, or, dare I say, after a kiss. He told me that it was important at such times to say out loud, 'If this isn’t nice, what is?'"
Patti Smith // "No one expected me. Everything awaited me."
Charles Bukowski // "I always had this certain contentment…I wouldn’t call it happiness…it was more of an inner balance that settled for whatever was occurring… It helped in the factories and when relationships went wrong…it helped through the wars and the hangovers, the back alley fights, the hospitals… To walk across the floor to an old dresser with a cracked mirror…see myself, ugly, grinning at it all. What matters most is how well you walk through the fire."
Joni Mitchell // "Keep a good heart. That’s the most important thing in life. It’s not how much money you make or what you can acquire. The art of it is to keep a good heart."
Martha Graham // "There is a vitality, a life force, an energy...that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist... The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open."
Leonard Cohen // "You live your life as if it’s real... The evidence accumulates that you’re not running the show. You still have to make choices as if you were running the show, but you make your choices with the intuitive understanding that it’s unfolding as it must... And if you can relax in that...if you can even touch it, or if it asserts itself from time to time, then the invincible defeat is transcended."
Thelonious Monk // "Play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing...even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years."
Hermann Hesse // "This day will never come again and anyone who fails to eat and drink and taste and smell it will never have it offered to him again in all eternity. The sun will never shine as it does today...You must play your part and sing a song, one of your best."
Sylvia Plath // "What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world. It is that synthesizing spirit, that ‘shaping’ force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire... We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward."
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."