"I'll die for your sins if you live for mine." ~ Jim Carroll

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling." ~ David Foster Wallace

"Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to."" ~ Jim Jarmusch

"Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated." ~ Jean Baudrillard

"Happiness is a delicate thing. It is difficult to find within ourselves, and impossible to find elsewhere." ~ Sébastien-Roch Nicolas

"You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm." ~ Sam Harris, Free Will

"Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself." ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein in response to Jean-Paul Sartre

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." ~ Oscar Wilde

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." ~ H.P. Lovecraft

“No human relations are adequate to human desires.” ~ Charles Baudelaire

"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."

"In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present."

"Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished."

"The feeling of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility."

Quotes by Francis Bacon

"l'enfer, c'est les autres" ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

"There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous." ~ Raymond Chandler

"We need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex in all their dark, unconsoling mysteries. The feminist of the fin de siècle will be bawdy, streetwise, and on-the-spot confrontational, in the prankish Sixties way." ~ Camille Paglia, 1992

"The sky hides the night behind it and shelters the people beneath from the horror that lies above." ~ Paul Bowles

"I think about dying. I've come to realize we all die alone in one way or another." ~ Richard Pryor

"The sadness will last forever." ~ The last words of Vincent van Gogh

"That's what a project is: a heavy question mark.You're the dot under that mark and you mustn't let it crush you." ~ Leos Carax on the making of Pola X.

"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore." ~ André Gide

"There is no contradiction between free will and knowing in advance precisely what one will do. If one knows oneself completely then this is the situation. One does not deliberately do the opposite of what one wants." ~ Kurt Gödel