Anthony Bourdain // "It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description...seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and what’s happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there...with your eyes open...and lived to see it."
Jean Cocteau // "If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed."
Henry Miller // "Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths."
Zadie Smith // "And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems like some long, dirty lie...and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter? ...The land of accidents sounded like paradise to her. Sounded like freedom."
Jorge Luis Borges // "Don't talk unless you can improve the silence."
Ann Druyan (& Carl Sagan) // "I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is... Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous...not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance... That pure chance could be so generous and so kind... That we could find each other...in the vastness of space and the immensity of time... The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful."
Keanu Reeves // "The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way."
Patti Smith // "That's what artists do, that's what poets do...we all do it. We start with something, and sometimes we destroy everything that we've made in order to get to the core place where we started from."
David Byrne // "I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe... I wouldn't be surprised if poetry...in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes and designs...is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song."
Pablo Picasso // "What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician...or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image... No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war."
James Baldwin // "The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it."
Miles Davis // "Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent."