A Quote by Okkyung Lee

Well, I'd say that I'm mostly drawn to people who are genuine and willing to take a step to the unknown. So when I play with these people, usually there's this sense of that 'yes, we are doing it together right at this moment without any agenda' feeling which is so exciting! It means that there is this sense of trust, that whatever I throw in the music that's happening, they will make it work and send something to work with in my direction. Hopefully they feel the same about me.
With abstract work, I never was quite sure what it was that felt right about the painting, but I did know that I responded to it and I liked whatever it was offering me. That's something that seems to happen as well when I'm writing, where maybe things that don't necessarily make a lot of logical sense are put together, and yet we struggle to make sense of these things somehow. I'm not quite sure why that is; it's something about human nature, I guess.
When people get in your face and say, 'This will pass,' you think, Are they crazy? I'm never gonna feel any better than I feel right this minute and nothing's ever gonna make sense again... You see a lot of people play this blame game. Blame, blame, blame. You know? And it's a really easy thing to do, and I'm certainly guilty of it. [You have to] look at yourself and go, 'What part of this do I need to own? Which part of this is my responsibility?' And that's the painful work that you have to go through to hopefully get some real life knowledge out of it.
It is necessary for all of us to awaken in ourselves this spirit of cooperation, for then it will not be a mere plan or agreement which causes us to work together, but an extraordinary feeling of togetherness, the sense of joy in being and doing together without any thought of reward or punishment.
We`ve got to stand with those people who are being attacked today, but at the same time, it`s not good enough to say that racism and xenophobia is bad. We`ve got to reach those people today who are so angry, who are so hateful and say, yes, you have a right to be angry, don`t take it out on the Muslims. Work with us to create an agenda and political movement that will make your life better, not just other people`s life worse.
I like relaxed sets. I like to feel that I can make a mistake without feeling like I'm costing somebody money. I like a sense of freedom. I like it when people are open and are willing to let you do your work.
In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: they must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it - not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of others for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the world may say or think about it.
I would just like to say this about all the married people working together on the set: it was just a joy. That is the great joy to go to work with people that you love, whether they be people that you are in love with or people that you just love and be creative and artistic and make things that you want to send out into the world and make people feel good. It was a great environment to work in for me.
Where do we invest our trust now? In politicians? Most people would say not. In banks, in religion, in a sense of nationhood? In each other? Even that has been complicated. It feels like there's a total collapse of trust, but without trust, it's impossible to have any sense of who one is.
At any moment, whatever we are experiencing, only one of two things is ever happening: either we are being with what is, or else we are resisting what is. Being with what is means letting ourselves have and feel our experience, just as it is right now. ... This is where genuine creativity, health, and communication, as well as spiritual power, arise from.
In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as well produce a cozy emotional feeling as you can a cough or sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our well-being to that end.
It's better to throw a theoretically poorer pitch whole-heartedly, than to throw the so-called right pitch with feeling of doubt-doubt that's it's right, or doubt that you can make it behave well at that moment. You've got to feel sure you're doing the right thing-sure that you want to throw the pitch you're going to throw.
I think if there's ever been a time we need music more, it's now. For our kids, it teaches you to take time, to listen, to work together, to listen to other people, and to use your brain. That's why classical music doesn't work when you throw it at people in a subway platform while they're rushing to work. Classical music is something that needs to be contemplated, you have to be completely present with an active mind that's working. It's not background music.
The American Dream means being part of a society that allows you to be or do whatever you want, and to have a sense that your individual optimism and hard work will be rewarded. It exists outside of the U.S. as well as inside. People continue to come here because they want to improve their lives, they want to be able to support themselves and they want to live in freedom. A lot of people who criticize this country still send their children here to study.
A lot of me figuring out how to love myself more involves finding the things that I'm ashamed of and looking them right in the eye. And something I always find beautiful about Jesse's work is that he finds beauty without any calculation. People say that his work is dark, but he never sees it as such. For him it's all almost about educating people to process why they feel disgust.
If you experience that feeling of being in a rut in your life, then something's not right. A lot of people who feel that way don't take the time to say, 'O.K., well, what am I doing? Is that what I want to be doing? What is it making me feel this way?' You have to identify what specifically is making you feel stuck.
Incidentally, part of a photographer’s gift should be with people. You can do some wonderful work if you know how to make people understand what you’re doing and feel all right about it, and you can do terrible work if you put them on the defense, which they all are at the beginning. You’ve got to take them off their defensive attitude and make them participate.
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