"The only valid way to criticize a movie is to make one of your own."

- Jean-Luc Godard, filmmaker and former film critic

—

Baudelaire wooed Mme. Sabatier for years, with anonymous poems he later signed. One night after a trial concerning "The Flowers of Evil", she finally gave in to him. The next day he broke it off with her. "Yesterday you were a Goddess, so convenient, beautiful, so sacred. Now you are a Woman."

- from Agnès Varda's "The So-Called Caryatids"

—

"If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams and I don't want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life, with this project."

- Werner Herzog, "Burden of Dreams"

—

"Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!"

- from Moby Dick by Herman Melville

—

"There are always moments when one feels empty and estranged. Such moments are most desirable, for it means the soul has cast its moorings and is sailing for distant places. This is detachment—when the old is over and the new has not yet come. If you are afraid, the state may be distressing, but there is really nothing to be afraid of. Remember the instruction: Whatever you come across—go beyond.”

- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj