“It’s no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world, just as it’s no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of rock, fifty thousand years old. (Like the faint thump from behind the womb wall.) It’s no metaphor to witness the astonishing fidelity of minerals magnetized, even after hundreds of millions of years, pointing to the magnetic pole, minerals that have never forgotten magma whose cooling off has left them forever desirous. We long for place; but place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment.” Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

"Pay attention. Be honest. Tell about it."  Mary Oliver

 “Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war...And he does at his best what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and with that revelation to make freedom real.” James Baldwin from a 1962 essay "The Creative Process"

"When we commit to action, the universe comes to meet us in unforeseen and providential ways as though it holds the extra firestick needed to ignite the fire. It only does this once the leap into the unknown has been taken." Lucy Neal in Playing for Time: making art as if the world mattered 

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Howard Thurman