Quotations

"Look at me and tell me if I don't have Brazil in every curve of my body."

— Carmen Miranda, Brazilian samba singer, born 1909

"I've chosen my wedding ring large and heavy to continue forever. But exactly because of that all the time that Dave and I have an argument I feel it like handcuffs, and on anger time I throw it in a basket. Poor Dave, he bought me three wedding rings already!"

— Carmen Miranda, Brazilian samba singer, born 1909

"Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it's an exchange of blood, a total embrace - without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself."

— Joan Miro, Spanish painter, born 1893

"The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later."

— Joan Miro, Spanish painter, born 1893

"In the pale light of daybreak the gravestones looked like so many white sails of boats anchored in a busy harbor. They were sails that would never again be filled with wind, sails that, too long unused and heavily drooping, had been turned into stone just as they were. The boats' anchors had been thrust so deeply into the dark earth that they could never again be raised."

— Yukio Mishima, Japanese author, born 1925

"Dreams, memories, the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles."

— Yukio Mishima, Japanese author, born 1925

"It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams."

— Gabriel Marquez, Colombian author, born 2014

"I write poetry because I can’t disobey the impulse; it would be like blocking a spring that surges up in my throat. For a long time I’ve been the servant of the song that comes, that appears and can’t be buried away. How to seal myself up now? It no longer matters to me who receives what I submit. What I carry out is, in that respect, greater and deeper than I, I am merely the channel."

— Gabriel Marquez, Colombian author, born 2014

"On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious."

— Edgar Mitchell, American astronaut, born 1930

"Suddenly, from behind the rim of the Moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth . . . home."

— Edgar Mitchell, American astronaut, born 1930

"In outer space you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.
From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "look at that, you son of a bitch.""

— Edgar Mitchell, American astronaut, born 1930

"Chase away the demons, and they will take the angels with them."

— Joni Mitchell, Canadian musician, born 1943

"Won't you stay? We'll put on the day and we'll talk in present tenses."

— Joni Mitchell, Canadian musician, born 1943

"They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum."

— Joni Mitchell, Canadian musician, born 1943