Charles Bukowski // "Your life is your life. Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. Be on the watch. There are ways out. There is light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness. Be on the watch. The gods will offer you chances. Know them. Take them. You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. And the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. Your life is your life. Know it while you have it. You are marvelous. The gods wait to delight in you."
James Baldwin // "I can’t be a pessimist, because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive."
Heath Ledger // "Honesty always gets my attention. Not particularly someone who is honest to me, but someone who is honest with themselves."
Leonard Cohen // "Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in."
Wendell Berry // "I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows where the rarest wildflowers are blooming, and who goes, and finds that he is smiling not by his own will."
Audrey Hepburn // "I believe, every day, you should have at least one exquisite moment."
David Bowie // "Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting."
Anthony Bourdain // "Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom...is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go."
Hunter S. Thompson // "A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance... You have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else... But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living within that way of life. But you say, ‘I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.’ And there’s the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don’t know...is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by deciding to look, you go a long way toward making the choice."
David Lynch // "No matter what the weather is, I wish for all of you blue skies and golden sunshine internally all along the way."
Arundhati Roy // "The system will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling…their ideas, their version of history…their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We may be many and they be few... Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
Toni Morrison // "For me, success is not a public thing. It’s a private thing. It’s when you have fewer and fewer regrets."