Jack Kerouac // "The world you see is just a movie in your mind. Rocks dont see it. Bless and sit down. Forgive and forget. Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now. That’s the story. That’s the message. Nobody understands it, nobody listens, they’re all running around like chickens with heads cut off. I will try to teach it but it will be in vain, s’why I’ll end up in a shack praying and being cool and singing by my woodstove making pancakes."
Charles Bukowski // "There were these people on the ground, they were reaching up their arms and trying to pull me down but they couldn't do it. I felt like pissing on them. They were so jealous. All they had to do was to work their way slowly up to it as I had done. Such people think success grows on trees. You and I, we know better."
Agnes Varda // "I don’t want to show things, but to give people the desire to see."
Jean Reno // "You have to show it in your eyes and in your attitude...honesty has to come from your whole body."
Sylvia Plath // "Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed...to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars...to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording...all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night."
Katharine Hepburn // "You can't just be talented... You also have to become necessary to people, by working hard and well and bringing more than your bones and your skin to the project. Don't just show up. Transform the work, yourself, and everybody around you. Be needed. Be interesting. Be something no one else can be...and consistently."
Albertine Sarrazin // "I would like to stay like this, lazy, warm, in the silence where only our regular breathing can be heard, without ever having to make gestures, speak words which sell us out and betray us; this moment is real and alive, I stretch it into eternity..."
Björk // "I get obsessed by nerdy little things in my corner that no one else is interested in."
William S. Burroughs // "If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future."
Tom Waits // "My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. 'Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?' they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, 'Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you.' And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, 'Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest.' So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day."
Albert Camus // "My dear, in the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love... In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that…in the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger...something better, pushing right back."
Kurt Vonnegut // "I've often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they're on, why they don't fall off it, how much time they've probably got here... I didn't learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society... It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it."