The hardest thing in the world is simplicity.

— James Baldwin

The longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you.

— Joseph Brodsky

The Beauty of Boundaries; Snøhetta

Memory is a poet, not a historian.

— Paul Géraldy

In the end there doesn't have to be anyone who understands you. There just has to be someone who wants to.

— Robert Brault

Sexy doesn't impress me. Smart impresses me, strength of character impresses me. But most of all, I am impressed by kindness. Kindness, I think, comes from learning hard lessons well, from falling and picking yourself up. It comes from surviving failure and loss. It implies an understanding of the human condition, forgives its many flaws and quirks. When I see that in someone, it fills me with admiration.

— Lisa Unger

The moment was all; the moment was enough.

— Virginia Woolf

He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.

— Franz Kafka

Kitty Kraus | Untitled | 2006

I looked around at the rooms that I did not see as rooms but more as a landscape for my emotions, a biography of memory.

— Anne Spollen

What I needed seemed to be absent everywhere.

— Charles Bukowski

Tokyo Story; dir. by Yasujirō Ozu in 1953

Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.

— Rumi

The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.

— Junot Díaz

Because I know that time is always time. And place is always and only place. And what is actual is actual only for one time. And only for one place.

— T. S. Eliot

David Guttenfelder; Life in the Cult of Kim

Yet you still value the things you've lost the most. Because the things you've lost are still perfect in your head. They never rusted. They never broke. They are made of the memories you once had, which only grow rosier and brighter, day by day. They are made of the dreams of how wonderful things could have been and must never suffer the indignity of actually still existing. Of being real. Of having flaws. Of breaking and deteriorating. Only the things you no longer have will always be perfect.

— Iain Thomas

KUNSTMUSEUM

Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.

— Gloria Steinem

Never, never tell them. Try and remember that. Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone anything again.

— Ernest Hemingway

Sensuality has been known to overcome even the most rational of buildings. [...] Architecture is the ultimate erotic act. Carry it to excess and it will reveal both the traces of reason and the sensual experience of space. Simultaneously.

— Bernard Tschumi

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at work ...

She felt that she wanted to enclose the present moment; to make it stay; to fill it fuller and fuller, with the past, the present and the future, until it shone, whole, bright, deep with understanding.

— Virginia Woolf

When I see a film and I like it, I want to share my enthusiasm for it with others. There is so little in this modern commercial world that is really and truly exciting. That it's very important for me that those little fragments of beauty, of paradise, are brought to the attention of friends and strangers equally.

— Jonas Mekas