Nina Simone // "I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I’m doing and why."
River Phoenix // "It’s not about a career. It’s about believing in something, it’s about prosperity. And it’s about caring and empathizing and wanting to create the best, the most true to life, the most real."
Bob Dylan // "Destiny is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you’re about will come true."
Jeff Buckley // "The most audacious thing I could possibly state in this day and age is that life is worth living. It’s worth being bashed against. It’s worth getting scarred by. It’s worth pouring yourself over every one of its hot coals."
Joan Didion // "We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give...we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us... To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves...there lies the great singular power of self-respect."
Björk // "It takes a long time to fully become who you are."
Jean-Luc Godard // "He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch."
Clarice Lispector // "It’s inside myself that I must create someone who will understand."
Henry Miller // "I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul."
Frida Kahlo // "Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light."
Viggo Mortensen // "To be an artist, you don’t have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It’s just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life."
Anais Nin // "I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits."