Vincent Van Gogh, Letter to Theo

My dear Theo,
Thanks for your letter, thanks for the enclosure. Now listen here.
[…]
I tell you, if one wants to be active, one mustn't be afraid to do something wrong sometimes, not afraid to lapse into some mistakes. To be good — many people think that they'll achieve it by doing no harm — and that's a lie, and you said yourself in the past that it was a lie. That leads to stagnation, to mediocrity. Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.
You don't know how paralyzing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter you can't do anything. The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares — and who has once broken the spell of 'you can't'.
Life itself likewise always turns towards one an infinitely meaningless, discouraging, dispiriting blank side on which there is nothing, any more than on a blank canvas.
But however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn't let himself be fobbed off like that. He steps in and does something, and hangs on to that, in short, breaks, 'violates' — they say.
Let them talk, those cold theologians.
Yours truly, 
Vincent

Ori Elon, creator of Shtisel

The longing for the dead and, no less, the longing for the living. The unbridgeable distance that always exists between any two people, between family members, between loved ones. The distance between man and God, and also the unbridgeable distance within man himself — between the mind and the heart. In the third season, the feeling of loss and longing is even more acute

Raymond Chandler

I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

Notes by Octavia Butler

Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. 

Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours

You love most of all those who need you 
as they need a crowbar or a hoe. 
You have not grown old, and it is not too late 
To dive into your increasing depths 
where life calmly gives out its own secret.

Kate Baer, “Motherload”

...

She keeps an office in her sternum, the flat
bone in the center of her chest with all its
urgent papers, vast appointments, lists of
minor things. In her vertebrae she holds more
carnal tasks: milk jugs, rotten plants, heavy-
bottomed toddlers in all their mortal rage.

T. E. Lawrence

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

 

 

James Baldwin, “Me and My House”

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Leo Tolstoy

Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.