James Baldwin // "You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you."
Marco Pierre White // "I believe there’s really two species of human beings. The first species is the most common, there’s more of them. They are individuals who, like we all, are born into a certain world and they become a product of that world. They absorb that environment they are born into, they become an extension of it, they become part of it... The rarer species, in my opinion, is the individual who has been damaged as a child. They have suffered misfortune and great tragedy. This doesn’t mean that they are better people, it just means they have suffered... And very few individuals suffer that tragedy. But what happens...is an invisible shell covers you. It protects you, so you don’t absorb the world you’re brought into, you don’t become part of that world...you observe that world."
Jeff Bridges // "Most cynics are really crushed romantics: they've been hurt, they're sensitive, and their cynicism is a shell that's protecting this tiny, dear part in them that's still alive."
Joan Didion // "We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception...didn't we do this, didn't we do that...but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living."
Audrey Hepburn // "No matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself."
Martha Graham // "There is...only one of you in all of 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."
Albert Camus // "Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love."
Sam Shepard // "Look it, you start out...and you’re full of defenses. You have all of this stuff to prove. You have all of these shields in front of you. All your weapons are out. It’s like you’re going into battle. You can accomplish a certain amount that way. But then you get to a point where you say, 'But there's this whole other territory I'm leaving out.' And you begin to see that you leave out so much when you go to battle with the shield... You can’t grow that way... There just comes a point when you have to...risk becoming more open to the vulnerable side, which I think is the female side. It’s much more courageous than the male side."
Haruki Murakami // "What's nurtured slowly grows well."
Anais Nin // "I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me...the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself...That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art."
Ai Weiwei // "Maybe to be powerful is to be fragile."
Barack Obama // "Hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it. Hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be."