Joan of Arc came back as a little girl in Japan, and her father told her to stop listening to her imaginary friends.

Elvis was born again in a small village in Sudan, he died hungry, age 9, never knowing what a guitar was.

Michelangelo was drafted into the military at age 18 in Korea, he painted his face black with shoe polish and learned to kill.

Jackson Pollock got told to stop making a mess, somewhere in Russia.

Hemingway, to this day, writes DVD instruction manuals somewhere in China. He’s an old man on a factory line. You wouldn’t recognise him.

Gandhi was born to a wealthy stockbroker in New York. He never forgave the world after his father threw himself from his office window, on the 21st floor.

And everyone, somewhere, is someone, if we only give them a chance.

—  Iain S. Thomas, I Wrote This For You  (via atramentum)

You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.

— (via rainydaysandblankets)

What the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves. They’re entirely themselves, they’ve got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it’s authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

— David Foster Wallace (via paradoxicalsentiments)

Also you are a fool to seek the kind of art you don’t like. You are a fool to read classics because you are told to and not because you like them. You are a fool to aspire to good taste if you haven’t naturally got it. If there is one place where it is idiotic to sham it is before a work of art.

— Ezra Pound, “The Serious Artist” (via farewell-kingdom)

People aren’t either wicked or noble. They’re like chef’s salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.

— Lemony Snicket (via likeafieldmouse)