“I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty, as librarians, or teachers, or parents, or writers, or simply as grown-ups, to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb. And never, under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

— Mary Oliver

“Actually, it’s when you see too little that you run the risk of being influenced. If you see a lot, you can choose the films you want to be influenced by. Sometimes the choice isn’t conscious, but there are some things in life that are far more powerful than we are, and that affect us profoundly.”

— Jacques Rivette

“It puzzled women who wore sensible stuff dresses why Emily wore white the year around. Various fantastic tales were circulated about her. Sometimes such stories made us laugh; more often they made us hate the stupidity that invented them. She puzzled those people she was not just like, simply because she was not like everybody else of that day and place. ‘Self-expression’ was not in vogue in her day. It was hard to put up with in a country village. Why should she wear white? What good reason was there for her not doing exactly what everybody else did? What was she making a mystery about? And the only person who never thought of it as a mystery was Emily herself, as she moved about her father’s house and garden. They could no more approach her than they could make the moon come down and sit on their parlor sofas!”

— Martha Dickinson Bianchi on Emily Dickinson

“How does one get the ‘subaltern demon’ inside oneself to be quiet? Sonyichka, I don’t know any way other than to link up with the cheerfulness and beauty of life which are always around us everywhere, if one only knows how to use one’s eyes and ears, and thus to create an inner equilibrium and rise above everything petty and annoying.”

— Rosa Luxemburg (letter from prison)

“It’s hard to say which ones had an influence on me because, on a conscious level, I never tried to make use of someone else’s experience. There are film directors who are dear to me because of their existence and visual system. I feel a great affinity for them, and there is a big chance that, in one way or another, they influenced or continue to influence my own perceptions in cinema.”

— Larisa Shepitko

“The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as ‘Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun to Be With.’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as ‘a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.'”

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The things you love and revisit become a mirror to yourself across time.”

— Maya Cade

“‘Why are things as they are? Must they be as they are? What might they be like if they were otherwise?’ To ask these questions is to admit the contingency of reality, or at least to allow that our perception of reality may be incomplete, our interpretation of it arbitrary or mistaken.

I know that to philosophers what I’m saying is childishly naive, but my mind cannot or will not follow philosophical argument, so I must remain naive. To an ordinary mind not trained in philosophy, the question-do things have to be the way they are/the way they are here and now/the way I’ve been told they are?-may be an important one. To open a door that has been kept closed is an important act.

Upholders and defenders of a status quo, political, social, economic, religious, or literary, may denigrate or diabolize or dismiss imaginative literature, because it is—more than any other kind of writing—subversive by nature. It has proved, over many centuries, a useful instrument of resistance to oppression.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“My final advice for artists who decide to devote themselves to the art of photomontage: never part company with the pencil. Remember, not a single day without a drawing! Only thus and only then will you perfect your mastery, will the truth of life exist in your works, and they will without fail find response in the viewer’s soul.”

— Alexander Zhitomirsky