I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Donât search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
Thereâs a logic thatâs long guided Hollywood, at least since the beginning of the blockbuster era: Teens will watch things intended for them but will shy from things aimed squarely at adults. Adults will watch things aimed at them, but will also watch things aimed at (older) teens. Men will watch things made for them, but will shy from things made âforâ women. Women will watch films made for them and will also readily watch things made for men. So if you want to make the biggest hit possible, you aim for something that will hit all four quadrants: a film aimed squarely at an audience of 16-18 year old boys.
Whether [my drawings] were good or bad had nothing to do with their most valuable asset: They were a means of experiencing a place or a moment more deeply.
Originality, personality, or style can neither be encouraged nor prevented. Forget the matter.
We all have three voices: the one we think with, the one we speak with, and the one we write with.
Love isnât something we fall in or out of, but something we remember we are part of
At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.
Memory is a poet, not a historian.
I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it. With tiny differences creeping in at each cycle, the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us farther away.
The memory of happiness is perhaps also happiness
A flower is not a flower. It is made only of non-flower elements: sunshine, clouds, time, space, earth, minerals, gardeners, and so on. A true flower contains the whole universe. If we return any one of those non-flower elements to its source, there will be no flower.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. Â Â Â Â For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. Â Â Â Â You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
Eventually everything connects.
I believe that if you look long and hard enough at what you loved best at fourteen and how you lived then and what you saw in the world, it will reveal both the world and you.
All I am, is what I’m going after.
âI donât make the rules.â âSure you do. We all do.â
I donât need the lives, I need the aliveness of the work.
It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. NaĂŻvetĂŠ - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.
Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i.e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.
In a world as vast as this one, seeing something once actually counts for a lot.
I think today we do not know how to go about building a water fountain. What we know is how to build one thousand water fountains.
To lure back enchantment, we must learn to create the nook, to appreciate the wilder garden, to consider the power of shadows and small spaces, to welcome living materials over insensate ones.
People have done this before, but not us.
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.