“Love is the best and the noblest thing in the human heart, especially when it is tested by life as gold is tested by fire. Happy is he who has loved much, and is sure of himself, and although he may have wavered and doubted, he has kept that divine spark alive and returned to what was in the beginning and ever shall be.”

— Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), in a letter to his brother, Theo van Gogh (1857-1891), Amsterdam, dated 3 March 1878, in “The Letters Of Van Gogh”, translated from the French and Dutch by Arnold Pomerans

A person doesn’t get it all at once, and most of those who have become something very good have gone through a long, difficult period of preparation that was the rock upon which their house was founded.

— Vincent van Gogh, Ever Yours: The Essential Letters

Loving Vincent: A movie about a young man who goes to a hometown of painter Vincent Van Gogh to deliver the troubled artist’s final letter and ends up investigating the artist’s final days. This is such a must see movie, everything about it was absolutely beautiful. It really opened up my eyes.

“I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands.”

— Louise Bourgeois

“One must accept the fact that others don’t see what you do.”

— Louise Bourgeois

“Beauty? It seems to me that beauty is an example of what the philosopher’s call reification, to regard the abstraction as a thing. Beauty is a series of experiences. It is not a noun. People have experiences. If they feel an intense aesthetic pleasure, they take that experience and project it into the object. They experience the idea of beauty, but beauty in and of itself does not exist.”

— Louise Bourgeois from a conversation with Bill Beckley, 1997

“Space does not exist. It is just a metaphor for the structure of our existence.”

— Louise Bourgeois, exhibit in Dia: Beacon

“You dig in your mind. We all dig for the truth. A cat will dig in the garden to hide its shit.”

—Louise Bourgeois; Freud’s Toys.

Nature Study, Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois

The Godfather (1972) dir. Francis Ford Coppola

The Godfather

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Year: 1972

“You are beautiful. You’re the most beautiful girl in the world. You are my dream.”

Requiem for a Dream (2000)
dir. Darren Aronofsky

“We broke up April Fool’s day, so I took it as a joke. I’m willing to humor her for a month. Every day I buy a can of pineapple with an expiration date of May 1st, because May loves pineapple, and May 1st is my birthday. I tell myself that if May hasn’t come back by the time I’ve bought 30 cans, then our love will expire too.”

– Takeshi Kaneshiro in Chungking Express (1994) dir. Wong Kar-wai

Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, 1994)

Chungking Express (Kar Wai Wong, 1994)

We all need stories. What happens in our daily lives changes our stories. You can see the Italian cinema and the French new wave, in the 60s, the first generation after the second world war, so they have a lot of things to say and a new perspective. For these two years, Asian cinema, like Korean cinema, and even Thai cinema, they’ve become very, very strong, because they have their problems and new stories in their life. So they are not repeating the same old stories.

Wong Kar-wai on In the Mood for Love